Flash in the pan?

I’m very interested in making videos to do with my flying adventures and find it a lot of fun. My video editing package (Corel VideoStudio Pro) comes with an automatic music package but I have found that something like 80% of it isn’t to my taste.

As I can’t keep using the same pieces over and over again I find myself downloading royalty free material more and more from various internet sites and then editing it to delete the bits that I don’t like and then add the nice bits that I do like in at extra places in the tunes until I get final edits that are exactly what I want and of the right length. And I enjoy doing that as well.

I’ve always had a bit of a musical ear and one of my regrets is that I didn’t follow it up when I was younger and learn to play an instrument properly. Like many youngsters, I tinkered with keyboards and guitars but never put enough effort in sadly to make anything of them.

While playing around with music for my videos I’ve realised that huge volumes of really great stuff are being created on the ever more capable keyboard synthesizers that are available nowadays at quite affordable prices – Yamahas, Casios etc etc and that triggered me to do a bit of research on the internet in general and on Youtube. And I’ve become mesmerised to the extent that I want to be able to do what the people posting the videos do and I just know that I could if I tried.

So now I’ve decided that although I’ve left it a bit late in life, it’s now or never and that I’d like to get my hands on a keyboard to see what I can actually do. OK I’ll never in the time that I have available at my age be able to master the musical theory that the guys (and gals) who’ve been playing piano and keyboards since they were young have, but I don’t think that that will stop me still being able to have fun and create some reasonable music that will give me a lot of pleasure.

So what have I done? Well, a sequence of events came to fruition yesterday evening as though they were meant to be. Last week I spotted a used Yamaha keyboard some way away from where I live and contacted the seller who didn’t seem to be that fussed about selling it to be honest.

But then while I was waiting for them to come back to me to arrange a viewing, I rescanned the ads over the weekend and a much newer one (like only about 10 years newer!) showed up for just a little bit more money, but with a stand unlike the original one. And to top that, it was only about 30 minutes fom my house!

So to cut a long story short, I’m now the proud (and excited) owner of a terrific Yamaha PSR-E313 keyboard for not a lot of money which I can’t wait to get stuck into learning how to work and then how to play. Here’s a shot of it with my ‘learner’ chord and note stickers on it.

So far I’ve only been bashing out a few one-fingered melodies that sound gorgeous and learning to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with two hands (but only one finger left hand chords) but I’m really looking forward to getting stuck into it more seriously. There are some great tutorials on Youtube not to mention, of course, paid-for internet courses as well as instructional manuals. And in the final event, who knows, even a human teacher if I get that serious.

My thinking is that it’ll be a much better way to pass the dull, rainy days instead of just wasting time surfing the net and messing around on my computer until the day has been wasted and is gone. This, of course, will guarantee that we’ll have perfect weather over the coming summer months that will keep me well away from the keyboard 🙂

Will it only be a flash in the pan? Most learners lose interest in keyboards after a few months and put them back onto the small ad sites. Only time will tell if that will be the fate of my Yamaha…