Music – Learning anew

Despite not having played a musical instrument since 4th grade trombone, I picked up an M-Audio Oxygen 49 velocity-sensitive MIDI keyboard last Saturday, and after some deliberation, Cakewalk Sonar 7 Home Studio XL on Sunday.  I’ve been looking to find the right creative outlet, and recalling how music used to stimulate my story creation, and how I walk around making up ditties, and mixing media can lead to wondrous discoveries… I’ve decided to learn to play the keyboard at least enough to transcribe the sounds in my head to notes which virtual instruments can play.

While I’ve only gotten as far as the first part of Axel F (I recall that as a 5th grade rite of passage on the piano in the music room), I’ve also found that I’m intuitively finding which notes seem to go together.  I can hear myself playing a semi-random series of notes, and say, "wait, I think it would be better if I went to this note instead", and I’m right.  Good news, I think.

After trying a few more simple things learning from YouTube videos (oh boy is there a content curation opportunity there!), and getting the feel of a few more instruments, I think I’ll try recording myself humming or singing a tune and work out the notes under it.  I think that the hard part will be understanding the melody of the music independent of the words and their affectation atop it.

It’s fun to set things to harp or "string section" and just feel the music.  When I get more comfortable with Sonar, I’m also just going to set it recording and go to town, knowing I can copy-and-paste anything good in there from a playback.  Hooray MIDI, quantization, and transcription! 

I did buy little removable stickers to label the keys… which I think I might do just for a week or two.  I think I’ve come along well in the past few days, and will be able to tell if they’re hampering me and have to go.

Meanwhile… back to the joy of learning a completely new sort of language…

Edit:

In particular, I find that I like F, G#, Bb, B, and dropping down to… Eb.

Here was some playing with the first 4 of those — I know that my tempo isn’t consistent, but hear how the notes “fit”?