Do You Play Any Musical Instruments?

[Merlin77]

I play the violin, a bit of piano and the occasional drums.

Right now I am so angry because I can't get my bow to stay on the right string. I think it's because I tore something in my neck from push ups the other day and the tension goes into my right arm.

Do you play any instruments?

 

[Margret]

Yes, and no. I have an old keyboard, which is mostly good for working out tunes from recordings. The battery compartment door is missing, so it isn't safe to take anywhere.

It's been quite a while, but I used to play both soprano and alto recorders. I'd have to really work at it to get those skills back, and I seriously doubt that I could reach the holes on the alto recorder now, which leads to my preferred instrument, the guitar.

In June of 2012 I slipped and fell to my left, catching myself with my left hand. I broke a bone in my left forearm in 3 places. It had to be repaired surgically and is now held together with screws and plates. It was in a cast for months while the bone healed, and during that time my fingers were mostly curled. The ligaments shortened, and when it came out of the cast my left hand was tightly clenched. After a great deal of occupational therapy I am no longer in danger of bed sores from my nails growing into my palm, but I still have less mobility in my left hand, less of a reach than before, and less finger independence -- normally this only arises between the ring and small finger, with nerves that branch off from the same root nerve, but now, for some reason, my middle finger is involved also. Additionally, I have some neuropathy in that hand, and it just isn't as agile as I expect it to be. All of which is inhibiting my guitar skills. I have a classical guitar with a gorgeous voice, and I can't play it properly! I've thought of converting it to a left hand guitar and learning to play from scratch, but, in the first place that would be giving up, which I'm not willing to do, and in the second place I love finger picking and learning to do that with my left hand, as it is now, would be extremely challenging.

It's time I cut my nails and started re-acquiring my left hand finger callouses, because guitar practice does count as O.T., but it's going to take something more than practice to get back what I've lost, and, despite my natural stubbornness I'm beginning to feel doubtful.

Margret

 

[Merlin77]

Yes, and no. I have an old keyboard, which is mostly good for working out tunes from recordings. The battery compartment door is missing, so it isn't safe to take anywhere.

It's been quite a while, but I used to play both soprano and alto recorders. I'd have to really work at it to get those skills back, and I seriously doubt that I could reach the holes on the alto recorder now, which leads to my preferred instrument, the guitar.

In June of 2012 I slipped and fell to my left, catching myself with my left hand. I broke a bone in my left forearm in 3 places. It had to be repaired surgically and is now held together with screws and plates. It was in a cast for months while the bone healed, and during that time my fingers were mostly curled. The ligaments shortened, and when it came out of the cast my left hand was tightly clenched. After a great deal of occupational therapy I am no longer in danger of bed sores from my nails growing into my palm, but I still have less mobility in my left hand, less of a reach than before, and less finger independence -- normally this only arises between the ring and small finger, with nerves that branch off from the same root nerve, but now, for some reason, my middle finger is involved also. Additionally, I have some neuropathy in that hand, and it just isn't as agile as I expect it to be. All of which is inhibiting my guitar skills. I have a classical guitar with a gorgeous voice, and I can't play it properly! I've thought of converting it to a left hand guitar and learning to play from scratch, but, in the first place that would be giving up, which I'm not willing to do, and in the second place I love finger picking and learning to do that with my left hand, as it is now, would be extremely challenging.

It's time I cut my nails and started re-acquiring my left hand finger callouses, because guitar practice does count as O.T., but it's going to take something more than practice to get back what I've lost, and, despite my natural stubbornness I'm beginning to feel doubtful.

Margret

That's too bad about the hand and the guitar... you know, converting it to a left-hander wouldn't be too terrible, I know the story of this one violinist that had to play a reversed violin because he hurt his arm and couldn't do the proper movements. It would still be a challenge because you'd have to teach the hands their new roles. (It wouldn't really be giving up, more like improvising and adapting )

I an pretty clueless about guitar playing though. Is the hand that strums the right hand or the left? I never really notice when I watch guitar players.

 

[MoochNNoodles]

I played the flute when I was younger. I still have one; but it's been years since I've tried to play. The last time I tried DD was probably about 18 months old. She cried. I think it was too loud for her.

 

[Katie M]

I played flute in school, but any musical talent I have is in singing.

 

[Mother Dragon]

I played clarinet in school, but that was too far back to even think about. I've plinked on the piano but my hands are too small and my fingers too short. I've strummed an autoharp a time or two. We bought one to take out on the sailboat to sit out and sing at anchor. The dampness probably wasn't good for it, but only the case disintegrated. Now all I play is the radio and I don't do that well, either.

 

[Margret]

I an pretty clueless about guitar playing though. Is the hand that strums the right hand or the left? I never really notice when I watch guitar players.

The left hand chords, the right hand strums. Except, I don't strum. I finger pick. I use the thumb and first three fingers of my right hand independently, which means that, since my left hand fingers are having trouble working independently, and having trouble moving precisely, I'm afraid that finger picking would be as difficult as chording. And I don't want to switch to strumming; all my training is classical, and when I accompany myself while singing it's important to me that the guitar not drown my voice out, which it would if I strummed.

This song is finger-picked, and is one that I used to sing, accompanying myself on guitar (and I really worked to get it to the place where I could):

This song, which I love, is being strummed (with just a little picking) and sung by a woman with a much more powerful voice than mine:

Someday I'd like to come up with a good finger-picked version of "Ship of Stone," but even before my injury it contained chords I hadn't quite mastered. With a shorter reach on my left hand now, I'll probably never get those very basic (but hard for me, because my hands were small to start with) chords. And a capo isn't helpful here; I still end up with really difficult chords, and I've now given up on ever mastering the chords that would help me progress beyond where I was before the injury. I ended up buying a book, The Liberty Guitar Method, by Harvey Reid (Liberty Guitar). His method involves tuning the guitar differently and using a partial capo, which I also bought from him.

capo:
noun, plural capos.
1. any of various devices for a guitar, lute, banjo, etc., that when clamped or screwed down across the strings at a given fret will raise each string a corresponding number of half tones.

from the definition of capo at dictionary.com.

Capos are generally used to transpose to a different key, while the player uses the same chords the song was originally written in, or to give the guitarist a chance to use simpler chords while keeping the song in the same key. A partial capo frequently covers just the three treble strings, leaving the bass strings alone, but Harvey Reid's method uses a capo that covers either 3 or 4 of the internal strings. It's quite ingenious; a double sided capo. The bar part of the capo is 3 strings long on one side and 4 strings long on the other, and the clamp half can close in either direction. The book is basically a chord book, divided into 2 parts: one part for the 3-string capo, and one for the 4-string capo. I don't properly understand the theory, but, for some reason, the tuning change combined with the partial capo greatly simplifies most chords. I really wanted it in electronic format, and the e-book is available only for Apple products. This is why I now own a piece-of-junk first generation iPad. And the only reason Reid's method has any chance of working for me is that I now have a guitar tuner that can easily get a more accurate tuning than I can using harmonics and a tuning fork, in less than half the time, so it's easy to re-tune on the fly. I think that, with Reid's method and a lot more practice, I may be able to manage "Ship of Stone" one of these days.

Also, I ran into a chiropractor several months ago who thinks he has a clue about some of the nerve problems with my left hand, and a way to (perhaps) fix them. Unfortunately, he just suffered an arm injury himself and is no longer able to implement that plan. I'm currently searching for a chiropractor who can, who accepts Medicare. Google is proving remarkably useless in this endeavor.

Margret

 

[Merlin77]

Also, I ran into a chiropractor several months ago who thinks he has a clue about some of the nerve problems with my left hand, and a way to (perhaps) fix them. Unfortunately, he just suffered an arm injury himself and is no longer able to implement that plan. I'm currently searching for a chiropractor who can, who accepts Medicare. Google is proving remarkably useless in this endeavor.

Margret

Wow, that has got to be the worst coincidence ever!

 

[Merlin77]

I played clarinet in school, but that was too far back to even think about. I've plinked on the piano but my hands are too small and my fingers too short. I've strummed an autoharp a time or two. We bought one to take out on the sailboat to sit out and sing at anchor. The dampness probably wasn't good for it, but only the case disintegrated. Now all I play is the radio and I don't do that well, either.

Yeah, bad weather and humidity is terrible on instruments, I have to re-tune the violin twice in one short practice because of the winter coldness.

Radio playing is an ancient skill... a very hard skill to master...

 

[Margret]

Wow, that has got to be the worst coincidence ever!

There was a man by the name of Jakow Trachtenberg, a Jewish mining engineer, who lived in Russia and was put in charge of "supervising the formation of a well-developed navy" by the Tsarist government. (Jakow Trachtenberg - Wikipedia) After the revolution in 1917, when Lenin was rising to power, Trachtenberg spoke out against the Communists and had to flee to Germany in 1919, right after the end of WWI, just ahead of the people who'd come to arrest him. When Hitler rose to power, Trachtenberg had the temerity to say what he thought of the Nazis, as well, and this time he didn't make it out in time; he was put in a concentration camp. (I've over-simplified here; you can find the full story at Jakow Trachtenberg - Trachtenberg Speed Math. And in all fairness, as a well-known Jew, and a member of the intelligentsia, he probably would have ended up there anyway, but it took courage for him to speak up.)

One of the worst parts of the concentration camp for him was the comparative lack of paper, because he was one of those people who tend to think on paper. In order to keep his sanity while incarcerated, Trachtenberg decided to devise a way to do arithmetic -- all the basic things that sometimes need a lot of paper: addition of long columns of numbers, multiplication and division of large numbers, and taking square roots, in ways that would require less paper and/or would have easy and effective ways to check the work for accuracy.

Once he escaped from the camp, Trachtenberg taught his system to children who had been labeled "mentally retarded," and encouraged them to use it to show off. A person who knows the Trachtenberg system can write 2 gigantic numbers side by side, put a line under one of them, and multiply them, writing the answer as he or she works directly under the line. All intermediate steps are performed in the head. Once the children began demonstrating their new math skills and being applauded for them, it was noticed that they became better students all around, better at reading and all other subjects.

My appraisal: Trachtenberg's systems of long multiplication and long addition are works of genius. His long division is essentially what was being taught in "New Math" in the U.S. in the '50s and '60s and is no better than the original method of long division, though it's useful for helping children to understand why long division works, and his method of taking square roots is no better than the standard technique. You can find his technique in The Trachtenberg Speed System of Basic Mathematics, by Jakow Trachtenberg, adapted by Ann Cutler and Rudolph McShane.

Personally, I'd say that fleeing Lenin only to run into Hitler counts as a worse coincidence. I would also say that Jakow Trachtenberg was a better person than most (including me) and adept at making the best of a bad situation.

Yeah, bad weather and humidity is terrible on instruments, I have to re-tune the violin twice in one short practice because of the winter coldness.

I'm told that there was a lute player, back in the dim, dark recesses of time, who said something along the lines of "I've been playing the lute for 40 years, 39 of which I've spent tuning the lute."

Margret

 

[blueyedgirl5946]

I play guitar and sing. I have a group of friends that I go once a month to the nursing home. We sing and play gospel music for those folks and they seem to enjoy it..

 

[Winchester]

Many moons ago, I took piano lessons for about 14 years. I swore up and down that I'd never touch a piano again (a lot of bad memories with those darn lessons). Anyway, I recently had the first tuning done on my piano, which is now almost 60 years old) and have been practicing with my old books every night now for 30 minutes, much to Dear Richard's chagrin....seriously, he's OK with it; he just goes back to the bedroom to watch tv while I'm playing. Come spring, I plan on starting lessons again.

The piano tuner will come back in January to do the second tuning and then later on in the spring for the third.

 

[cheeser]

I used to play several instruments, e.g., piano, guitar, flute, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, trombone, baritone, recorders, and percussion. But over the years as life got a lot busier and more complicated, I got rid of everything except the grand piano. To be honest, I don't really have much time to play that either, but the cat enjoys sleeping on it.