I have a new enemy in my war against procrastination – my piano.
I once read a book that suggests that in order to motivate yourself you should make claims about yourself to motivate you to be the person you claim to be. I think that is nonsense, because by that token I can claim to be a pianist.
I am not a pianist. What I can say is that I am a very bad pianist who can play very simple tunes but mostly makes silly mistakes that frustrate me to the point where I feel like getting up and walking away forever.
Nevertheless, in my war against procrastination, I have managed, somehow to find some willpower that I didn’t think I possessed. When I walk upstairs I see the back room and there, taunting me, is my piano and I can see it through the open door. It says to me:
“Come and have a play if you think you’re good enough”.
And to be fair, I have started doing that more often. I am a big fan of routine and habits and this has helped me in my battles with procrastination. One habit I have created is to play the piano daily – and it works. Well – when I say “play the piano daily” what I really mean is “try to play the piano daily” or “play the piano like a blind baboon daily”.
It is working. Slowly but surely, I am actually improving. I can play simple versions of tunes like “Greensleeves”, “O Sole Mio”, “Little Brown Jug”, “The Can-can” and “Scarborough Fair” – sometimes without any mistakes.
Learning to play the piano was meant to be a retirement hobby but I got so excited by the idea that I started three years before I actually retired. Mrs PM can play a little too (she had some lessons as a child) and she plays fairly regularly too. She is much better than I am.
And now that I am retired, I can in theory spend more time learning.
My big plan and goal was to learn the piano and perhaps start creating some music of my own. I consider this to be a project rather than anything more serious. And before I retired I thought at some point I could invest in a synthesiser and perhaps have some fun making mp3’s via my laptop.
Then two things happened.
First, I have a friend, an ex-colleague who retired some years ago who told me that he his making music. I was interested and then amazed when he told me that he had published it on Spotify under the name Methyl Orange. I went home and discovered that he had recorded two albums at that point. And now he has a total of four albums.
Here is one from his latest album:
The second thing that happened was that my company decided to buy me a retirement gift. I opted to leap ahead and I chose this little beast:
I have spent some time in the last three months getting used to it. It is a surprisingly complicated device with a program menu that you can easily get lost in. I also know nothing about the various electronic music terms that are required to use such a device, things like MIDI, “Attack/Decay/Sustain/Release”, Envelopes, Gain, Oscillators – the list goes on.
But, dear reader, I am getting hooked. And I think I need to sit down and learn the terminology before I can get further anyway. That said, I have had a play with my new gadget and my knowledge is increasing to the point where I have managed to produce some weird musical snippets that actually sound okay (in my view).
Being a technophile, I now need to wrestle with the geek within who wants to blindly dive into the world of electronic music, and the creative person who wants to learn the piano, I am sensible though and I realise that learning the piano is the mandatory precursor to learning the synthesiser. I can however work in parallel to a certain extent. To be honest, anybody can make a synthesiser tune with little musical knowledge but it is so much better if you have the musical knowledge of how to play the piano.
You may think that this is where the story ends. It’s not.
There is a third component that is also important. This is software that runs on your laptop and is called a Digital Audio Workshop (or DAW for short), which enables you to record songs, mix songs and add even more effects. You can do things like play a guitar via your keyboard, the guitar being a “virtual instrument”. This opens up a whole universe of music creativity. Also there is so much to the DAW – it is a complicated tool.
Here is a demo of a DAW:
I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface yet. I need to improve my piano playing as a priority, I need to learn how to use my synthesiser properly, I need to get to grips with electronic music production, effects etc. and I need to learn about DAW that I have installed.
I am quite pleased that I have a technical background. I think I’m going to need it.
Mind you, AI could come to my rescue. I posted about the possibility of becoming a lazy blogger by allowing ChatGPT to write my blog posts for me. You can read about it here:
There are websites out there that will write songs for you that you can use on podcasts, websites etc.
I did try a demo on a website called Soundraw and asked it to write an ambient song. It actually wrote six of them for me. Had I not been a tight-fisted old git and actually put my hand in my pocket I could have paid for the songs and shown them to you.
You can of course try it yourself for free to see what I mean.
I will post my progress on this blog whether I succeed or not. At the moment I want to try to create something myself rather than trying to be lazy and letting AI do it for me.
It's quite exciting and a little bit scary because what I thought of as a simple and this project of my has, in the words of an ex-colleague of mine, “grown arms and legs”.
How am I going to find time to write, learn languages and create music?
It’s a tough dilemma to have – but an enjoyable one.
