thawts on music

Been studying piano for several months now... AND I KNOW NOTHING

Honestly the only thing motivating me is the personal interest in getting good at it.

It's been a life long dream.... I can only advise others in my position to kick yourself to do it even when you don't want to. There's a moment when I'm at the keyboard and I'm just lost and feeling out of it but then I begin to slightly care enough to keep discovering how to manipulate the keys to create the sounds I desire.

it's a hate love relationship I suppose...

love what I can do once I get past the fear of failure part... hate having to suffer the doubt and trepidation over my lack of experience and skill.

I'll also say, it's sad that people stop trying to improve themselves because someone else dictates that their life is over once they reach a certain age... It's bullshit. Keep learning new things, it's still possible.

I don't understand that mindset of immediate discouragement. It's asinine and sad. And honestly yeah it's motivated by some more complex reasons and agendas than are made clear.

Overall I wanted to post as a way of getting my beliefs on music and the art form a little more lucid to myself and to others. It's an escape from reality that's true but a needed one. It kinda does heal as many musicians will say. You feel better playing it or listening to it.

Can you learn? Can you or even me at my age now, old man 32 years old get this going and potentially get better. If you dedicate yourself..... yeah it's tougher. If I was still I'd say 20-something I'd say give it 10 years and I'll be proficient... At this point I'm looking at getting decent in maybe 4 to 5 years of hardcore deep practice... and not really trying to accomplish much else...

But as they say you won't get anything you want done without the core ingredient of passion. Age isn't going to make that happen. It's on YOU.

Do I love the piano or am I fooling myself into believing in my passion to play it and master it to some extent, not go all epic crazy with the high classics etc...

Damn, and this is where I have to say I've failed most. I don't know... Age is getting to me and usually I don't pay it much attention but I doubt my self more now as my life gets far more complex than it once was... All the bull crap of the world comes knocking around in my head and I don't feel as confident in my intellectual abilities as I used to be... Yeah tough crap to live with... But yeah I just tell myself it's for ME. It's not about proving anything and that helps... I don't really want to go play in front of anyone. I want to make myself feel proud of doing it and being good enough at it. Perhaps a little bit of that crazy delusional self-confidence is what ya gotta have to push through the lessons. Because EVERY time I start a lesson, I tell myself, piss off this piano stuff not gonna happen... but I tell myself to shut the f up about it... it's a painful cycle...

Uh, lastly I wanted to say in particular "how" to approach learning... slow, peacefully.... I still have that intensity of my school days in me, as if I MUST rush through and do it fast or the world will collapse in on itself and I die and explode... that's NONSENSE. Go as fast as you can go... I have to tell myself, there's nobody around to care how fast or slow I'm doing this and that's what you got to have to learn probably anything, isolation, peace. Then you go forward I think faster than if you had someone up your arse about getting it done because the only thing pushing you is you...

I'm not going to go into whether the school system is more effective than auto-didactic learning. It is for me I'll say that... some days I've actually binge-learned things. Like if I have to hack a phone and learn a million adb commands, new program, etc. it's something I get done in maybe a day or two vs a course somewhere that would take weeks and pointless homework assignments.

If you want to learn something yeah, these systems out there created in some laboratory aren't going to match the pace you and achieve on your own. And that's where I leave it...

It's a damn epic journey I hope to get better at. I am improving, that much has convinced me that it's possible, so yeah, I'm going to keep working on it.