let's talk musicanship

If were Ben Folds I'd be endlessly entertained by the ability to play my own songs and anything else I wanted to play. This shouldn't be construed as the start of a fantasy posting; it is rather a segway into how I can improve as a musician. I'm not trying to be a professional or even a live performer. I would like to be someone who gets better at playing the type of music I love so that when I belt out a tune at a party I am satisfied with my twenty five years of playing the piano.

Without analyzing my skills, let's just say that I'm a level 2 musician, somewhere beyond a beginner, and I want to improve over the years by a level above 2. 2 is the answer to everything, by the way. I recently spent two years learning jazz piano with a private instructor. I probably learned a lot from it, but I have difficulty applying the acquired skills to improve playing, which is what I do the most. I should be composing music and making arrangements of songs I want to play, since that's what we worked on it the lessons. But I don't do either of those things. Thus the taught type of playing didn't match what I do now, and also the genre didn't match what I do. I'm not a jazzer, I'm a pop "artist." We did work on pop a bit towards the end but it was exclusively arranging pop pieces. I need two things, I need to get better at improv and I need to find motivation to arrange and compose.

I can get help from either instructional material or a teacher. Perhaps I can find a hybrid, such as online videos of instructors that you pay to watch. These exist for guitar and for piano. They tend to be targeted to beginners, but I'll keep my eyes open for a suitable one.

The problem with being me

If I could describe to you the currents in my mind, you would probably nod with agreement. You might relate it your own currents that pulse within, swimming around your head and occasionally dipping into other organs when it's too big for your brain to contain. To describe how I feel, I start at the zero, zero, zero coordinate in my brain. The pulse goes out to my forehead and then down to my nose. It splits from there to the two sides of my jaw that stay stiff all day because they clench whenever I feel stress. Thence it shoots out a ahead of me and performs daring lunges and meager ascents all the live-long day. It drags the rest of me along with it until I get tired and fall behind. Then it patiently trots back and awaits my rejuvenation.

If I could reign in that current I would tether it to many ropes and then force it to spread in all directions in front of me, so that I might follow whatever bit of it I pleased, grabbing another reign and pulling myself left and right, like the feeling you get when you use a motor boat's velocity to accelerate you over the wake while water skiing. That terrific pull diagonally-forward leads you to a new point of braced anticipation. Though my course is inevitably set by external factors, I would like to create more the illusion of a spectrum of activity rather than the line that is reality.

It's hard for any of us to be errant, but it beats following that boring old rising and falling pulse that composes the daily rhythm which I've thus described. I need to find a way to live paragraph two. I sometimes feel it then loose it. Maybe I need to meditate, maybe I need to dance. All I know is that the minor adjustments aren't doing it for me. I'm thirty-two and I all too often feel like the sixteen-year-old who still sits in his room alone and wishes a friend would call.