My journey of learning music

learning-music.md

• 199X-XX-XX: Someone lends me their Roland Jupiter-4 and I'm supposed to learn to play the piano on it. However, the classical education and what you can do with an analog synthesizer drif apart somehow. It was fun to play with it though, I did not know modern styles of music too much though. After a few years when the realization kicked in that those instruments are very valuable I had to return it.
• 200X-XX-XX: Eventually I got a basic Yamaha Clavinova and some piano lessons. However, I was always too lazy to pracitce and maybe also not very talented? It lead nowhere, but I learned the basics. The Circle of fifths was a big mystery for me – why is it structured like this? When I moved to a different city I gave it away.
• 200X-XX-XX: I remember seeing Garage Band for the first time on some tiny Apple conference, and being pretty excited about it.
• 200X-XX-XX: A friend also tought me to play the drums for a bit, but I never properly got into it.
• 201X-XX-XX: I actually sang in a choir for a bit, participating in some really cool SATB of the Beatles and similar music.
• 2023-XX-XX: We did a bunch of Karaoke at the office, because there's a cool band room and why not. Eventually I even lead a workshop at some company event where we invented some own karaoke lyrics.
• 2024-09-24: Duolingo releases Music section for Android on Duocon, and I get stared with it on day 1. I finally feel like I can actually read sheet music. Their course is a limited to treble clef.
• 2024-10-XX: Inspited by Duolingo I soaked up a bunch of Wikipedia articles on music. How the scales work, really understanding the history that lead to the 12 equal temperament and finally understanding how the circle of fifths came to be. The interplay between physical truths and human perception is quite fascinating to me.
• 2024-10-09: On a mission to also get started with some simple instruments again, I buy a set of 6 Kazoos.
• 2024-11-18: Also, I get myself a Stylophone PINK - The Original Pocket Electronic Synthesizer SPECIAL EDITION. I really love the tiny instrument, and the fact that you can just play some simple melodies without much setup. I extract some tabs from music sheets of songs I like and eventually connect it to some nice loudspeakers as well. The not quite perfect instruments matches my not quite perfect playing very well.
• 2024-12-05: Now commited to giving music anothe show, I grab a AKAI Professional MPK mini Play MK3 and a Kala Waterman Soprano SWT Ukulele. The former connects to my phone and allows me to do the Duolingo lessions and a piano keyboard, which turns out to be a lot harder, but properly also a good practice. The latter allows me to venture into a completely new class of instruments on a budget. I'm afraid my fingers are not very flexible, but hopefully that can be trained.
• 2024-12-06: Also thanks to Thomann I got the Klevgrand Speldosa (Wintergatan) for free. After downloading it, I did not know how to use it and a journey began to actually enable this virtual instrument in Garage Band. But in the end I could use the MPK to play the Speldosa, and I was able to play Lilium in a really cool way.
• 2024-12-07: I also signed up for BandLab and created my first song. But so far inspiraton has yet to hit me. But being a web developer working for a social network, and knowing that web midi exists, this seems to be a really cool project.