Taking It Easy

Who knew taking it easy could be so much fun?!

I've been continuing to pick easy songs from my MP3 stash and play along with them, both on guitar and keyboard, and it's just been darn fun. Songs like Vangelis' "Hymne" and Alison Krauss' "Baby Mine", which are very simple, but get me to A) figure out what key it's in, B) play IN that key, and C) play in time.

Which leads me to another observation: those lesson books (Mel Bay, etc.) are full of songs that I don't want to play. (I mean, really, who DOES want to play Greensleeves and Koom Bai Yah or however you spell it?) Of course, coming up with enough different books to suit everyone's individual tastes is an impossible task, but that's all the more reason to throw the books out and find stuff I like to play.

And last night, I found a harder (for me) song, with triplets and sixteenth notes, but pretty much in a straight run, that's currently a challenge, but still doable (on the keyboard, anyway; I'm finding I'm better on keys than guitar atm). Gobs of fun!

I might just make it yet, takin' it easy.

What I've Learned Lately

Last weekend, I played Guitar Hero 3 for the first time, so naturally I'm addicted and am thinking about nothing but music again. My first thought after playing the game is "wow, I'm addicted". My second thought was "hey, why can't playing a real guitar be this much fun?"

By shear coincidence, IT Conversations released a talk by Raph Koster on Monday entitled "A Theory of Fun", which I listened to, which got me thinking more about how to make music fun. Fun, roughly speaking, is about learning, and is about a balance between too easy and too hard. There's obviously more to it than that, but kids think tic-tac-toe is fun, until they figure out that every game played well is a draw, then they move on. I've had loads of fun with various programming tasks, but only until I've explored them fully, at which point they become boring and I look for something else to do.

Then I started thinking about Runescape, which I've played way too much of over the past few months. RS has roughly 30 "skills" that you can gain experience in and "level up". The initial thrill of RS was learning how each skill worked, but even now, I find myself switching back and forth, trying to raise my lowest, working on the most fun, going back to one I haven't done in a while, etc. Some are exciting, some are flat out boring, but each can be fun, depending on my mood at the moment, how much of a challenge I want, etc.

Then back to Guitar Hero 3. I saw my nephew play one of the harder songs (on Easy, but it was still a challenge). I just laughed; no way would I start out on that. I went through the tutorials, then worked my way up through a few of the easier (yet fun) songs I knew. By the end of the evening, I had completed Cliffs of Dover twice, and was loving it.

I got a couple of insights from that. First, on a real instrument, I wanna play like Leo Kottke. Right now. (Ha, ha, only serious.) With GH3, I was much more realistic. Start simple, work your way up. RS does that, too. Start small, put in the time, get leveled up gradually.

Secondly, I was grooving on the feedback that GH3 gives. Not sure what to do about that re:real instruments, (an instructor can be paid to give feedback; perhaps I can find others to play with on occasion as well), but I at least realize that it's an issue.

Perhaps obviously, I shouldn't expect to progress on a real instrument as fast as I did on GH3 or RS. Those games lower the bar for what you have to do to progress, to keep folks playing. But I think I can do a much better job of breaking down learning music into smaller, more easily accomplished tasks, which can serve the same purpose.

So I'm going to be putting together a list of "skills" that I can move around among, to keep things interesting. One of them will be playing along with music I have and know (similar to me playing the songs in GH3 that I knew and liked), but I'll be quick(er) to say about any given song, "that one is a level (or dozen) above where I am right now; I'll save that one for later", rather than what I've been thinking, which is "there's no way I can do that".

Which leads to my last "thing I've learned lately", which I've known all along, but was still fun to see. I watched "Meet the Robinsons" last night, and just loved the scene where the kid had just used an invention to spew PBJ over the whole family, and was cringing, expecting them to be upset. They recoil, turn on him, and ... start cheering: "Yay! You failed!!" Yes, I can celebrate failure. I may not find joy in missing a note, but I can start looking at such failures as a reason to figure out why, and as an incentive to keep trying.

Boredom is my friend

I won't practice. I've tried, really I have. I say "this time will be different", and I "commit" to an hour a day, or a half-hour a day. I pick up my beginner's level books (Mel Bay for guitar, or Alfred's Adult for keyboard), and hop to it. Sometimes I make it a month, once or twice I've made it two or three. More often than not, I make it a week. This has happened at least once or twice a year for my adult life.

I just won't practice.

But the fact that I come back to it year after year tells me that something is going on between me and music. I can't just put it away. Something in me wants to make music.

Without getting too self-psychoanalytical, I think I try to bite off way too much at a time, and I think I've missed the mark in the past with my efforts. Rather than "learning to play an instrument", followed at some point by "then creating with that instrument", I'm instead going to just get my hands on the instrument (primarily keyboard, but perhaps guitar as well) very regularly. Hopefully daily, but if not quite that often, oh well. Make something up. Play around. No time limits, just make sure I'm there.

And then, I'm gonna get bored.

But it'll be a flavor of boredom that will make me curious about what else I can do. I will have run out of things that I know how to do, and will go looking for more. What little bit can I learn that'll make it a little bit interesting again. (Which will be a different kind of boring than the old, familiar "oh great, I've got to do scales AGAIN", which after a week or three, makes me want to scream.)

This happened this morning. Many years ago, a keyboard teacher taught me a blues scale. Pretty darn hard to play those 5 or 6 notes and make them sound bad. So for the past couple of weeks, I've been sitting down and playing the blues scale up and down the keyboard. And it's gotten pretty boring. So this morning, I did it again, only trying to figure out what else to put in there. I didn't come up with anything worth writing down, but I started jumping around a bit more, and threw in a few extra notes, just to see what they'd sound like. (Mostly, like crap, but here and there, I had a few happy mistakes.) So now I'm off and running again.

And in a few more days, when I get bored again, I might just try modulating from C to F or G, and see what that sounds like for a week or two.

Anyway, the point is to use my boredom as a wedge to get my brain to loosen up and have fun. To me, playing other peoples' music isn't that fun; making my own looks like a blast, and on those rare moments when I make up something interesting, it *IS* a blast.

So yes, boredom, or at least the right kind of boredom, is my friend. A gentle force to nudge me onward, and to remind me that I should be having fun. Because without that fun, I'll be done with this in a week.