Re: Piano lessons advice (O.T.)

["Stephen Goodman" <spgoodman@earthlight.net>]

?My own musical journey began with piano, but it was cursed by bad timing 
and other items.  My mother was more interested in us ingesting the 
Discipline of Practice than she was in us actually playing the piano... 
but 
ultimately this was unimportant as you will see.  My teachers on the 
keyboard went like this:

Age six, school lessons began just a month before summer vacation and my 
family's move to the East Coast;

Age eight, A woman in her 70s who ran off with her travel agent and was 
never heard from again;

Age nine, An old gentleman who sadly passed away;

Age 12, Another older lady who just failed to show up and never was heard 
from again;

Age 15, A guy with Marty Feldman eyes with a Liberace-style wardrobe who 
pulled the blinds on his place when I came for lessons (this lasted only 
three weeks);

Age 19, A marvelous guy who was one of Barry Manilow's arrangers and 
brought - instead of awful contrived pieces with titles like "Swaying 
Silver 
Birches" (shudder) - some of Mozart's pieces created to teach people 
keyboard skills.  Went on tour with Barry, never seen again.

Each of these teachers lasted less than three months.  Over time I 
assimilated the instrument enough to learn how to play by ear, but never 
really via sight-reading.  And at 13, my Dad (who had wanted to be a jazz 
trumpeter when he was in college and had met some of the greats like 
Raymond 
Scott!) was taking guitar lessons and the store went bankrupt.  They owed 
him $30, and told him to keep the acoustic nylon-string guitar.  It sat in 
the TV room corner until I secreted it upstairs with the instruction book. 
I couldn't make sense of the tabs etc and taught myself how to play using 
an 
open chord I figured out at the time (AEAEAC#) that as it happened was a 
basic blues tuning.

I wouldn't recommend this line of instruction to anyone!  But it worked 
for 
me, if after a long time. :)

-----Original Message----- 
From: Rainer Straschill
Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2011 7:25 PM
To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
Subject: Re: Piano lessons advice (O.T.)

Rick Walker schrieb:
> I think that  using C major (and all of it's resultant  7 Greek modes) 
>as 
> a point of departure and a way of understanding how to play in any key 
>is 
> the fastest way to get a handle on the instrument.
>
> In a very cool way,  the keyboard makes you think, specifically, of 
> intervallic relationships
> in a way that the guitar doesn't.
It would really be interesting to hear the opinion of someone who did
first learn the guitar and is now both an accomplished guitarist and
pianist on this "understanding piano for guitarists" topic.
And that might just be a problem - any of the people I can think of from
the top of my head (Gismonti, Towner, Keneally, van Halen) did start
with piano and then picked up guitar later...just a coincidence? Anyone
can name some counter examples?

Being an "amatuer Gismonti" myself (meaning: learning piano first, then
studying composition, then doing some guitar), I can only offer a look
at it from the other side:

(all of my statements describe my personal learning experiences here,
which might differ from those of others, and actually be
counter-intuitive or even inefficient):
Piano is very neatly organized in octaves, and how fingering stays
constant from octave to octave, which the guitar is not so much, at
least not intuitively (the major 3rd between G and B string doesn't help
here...). However, the guitar is (with the exception of the major
3rd...) more consistent with intervals, e.g. 2 frets = one tone, 1
string up 1 fret back = major 4rd etc, which the piano is not (unless
you're counting keys, which, due to the white/black logic, is not the
intuitive way to perceive it). On the piano, the step from the goal to
play a certain chord to fingering the right keys is chord -> intervals
-> notes -> fingering, i.e. from "maj7 on B" you go via "major third,
minor third, major third" to "B D# F# A#" to the actual hand position.
And this works well in all keys (and imo it actually helps if you start
doing so early on). And btw, you'll have a hard time even playing
standard pop/rock/blues chords when sticking with white keys.
Let's say you want a blues - do it in A (because its similar to
Aeolian), so you have the chords Am (works fine), Dm (works fine), Am
(works fine), E7 - buggers. Same if you play major (in C), and then want
to emphasise the tonic's double role as the subdominant's dominant by
adding a 7...

That being said - I'm mostly curious about the "guitarists who later
picked up piano and are famous for both" suggestions!

          Rainer

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