Learning the Piano – Part 11 – Longfellow Serenade – Key of E Major – and almost being a Deaf Infant

I’ve decided to tackle Neil Diamond’s Longfellow Serenade on vacation. My friend Tony lent me an old Yamaha 61 key keyboard, it’s got some pretty good sound but lacks the feel of my M-audio digital piano at home. It has 3/4 size keys but it is not as small as my Casio 4 note polyphony at home. I started banging through the melody and found the Yamaha adequate. The key of E Major has four sharps which is a big pain to learn. I play “Red Red Wine” which has only one sharp... (G Major) and it taught me a lot about how something is “suppose to sound”. I’d play the low F# in the melody as an F and it never sounded right, I got good at playing the wrong note too. Then it clicked, (I realized the note was F#) I don’t know why either…. the sound just wasn’t right.

As a small child I had chronic ear infections, so bad in fact it caused a speech problem that took years of therapy to correct it. R’s, S’s were my worse. I believe that because of this ear problem I’ve received the ability to tell what doesn't sound correct. It’s very finely tuned too. The flip side is I can’t tell how to fix what I am hearing or I’m not quite sure whats going wrong with the sound.

Now that I started playing music I find that the skill of finding problems with sound is helping me play better. It might take my a while to fix it, but I find fault aurally and intuitively which is pretty cool.