...and does it make you feel better?
I used to be a rather accomplished pianist and knew my way around a violin...and composed music that lots of people liked. I played in a band for a while, but I couldn't really write commercial grade music so I played keyboards and wrote lyrics, while my friend composed the music and sang. The thing is, he kept dating female band members and we could never form a steady group :eusa_snooty:
Anyway playing the piano used to really help me to feel better. I tried the other day and wow am I out of practice, and I'm thinking about using that available energy to learn the guitar instead. I quit playing the piano years ago because it dissolves my walls and barriers just as effectively as therapy and Celexa has, and at the time I needed those walls to survive.
Do you play anything? Is it rewarding for you on an emotional level or just something you do for fun?
Hi Becca,
I play guitars and sing. However, I find it very very difficult to play with any depth if I am unhappy. This bird can't sing if she isn't happy!
Having had a professional position for several years I also have times when it just feels like more work. That's when I put it down for a while and do something else-like stained glass, or go ride my motorcycle.
I have been building a small studio room in my attic for a couple of years and have just begun to put tracks into my computer. Hopefully I will have something to post online soon-if I can just get the computer in tune! To answer your question-yes it does make me happy.
Randi 8)
Does a CD player or radio count? That is about the only thing I play. ;D
Sorry Becca,
Hugs and Love
Janet
I've been playing bass for a while and although my professional CW days are long gone - I can still play some mean jazz and rock boxes.
It doesn't require quite the same precision as my 6-strings, and after my peripheral neuropathy, it's a blessing to play anything again.
Currently working on Santana's , Jobim's and Bugs Henderson's music - I prefer Road House Blues to most other forms. SRV gets me excited too.
What do I play? Mostly French Horn. But I can also play keyboards, percussion, and any brass or woodwind instrument out there. (I used to be a music teacher.) I know the basics of strings, guitar & banjo, but never was very good at them.
.
Aside from the horn though, I haven't played most of them in years.
Lap Steel and slide guitar, bass and trying to learn trumpet. I came back to playing after a break of quite a few years.
I have a Monterey single-cone resonator acoustic and a home made electric steel. Mostly I play blues based stuff on guitar, but am trying to get into jazz bass.
I picked up a trumpet at a price that was too good to miss and am still trying to get the basics sorted.
A bit obscure, but I (attempt) to badly play the Japanese Shakuhachi. It's an end-blown bamboo flute that attributes a great part of its history to being associated with Zen Buddhism (specifically Sui-Zen). It is touted as being one of the simplest (construction) non-percussive instrument in the world - i.e. a bamboo tube with five holes and an angled blowing edge. It is also reputed to be the most difficult/complex woodwind instruments in the world to play. And I play it rather poorly after some 20 years of lackadaisical attempts at practicing.
Actually, when I started, I played/practiced every day and had gotten almost pretty fairly kinda almost half decent - of course I had a teacher then. For the past fifteen years, I have been without a teacher and have lost almost all of the self-discipline needed to sit down and practice, so I have gotten quite pathetically ignorant of the ability to play anything but the first piece I learned. Also the music is all in Japanese notation (not that matters, I couldn't read western music notation any better).
It is a beautiful instrument and I have six of them in various sizes and styles (root-end ji-ari, root-end ji-nashi, non-root end ji-nashi, non-root end black bamboo ji-nashi, 1.8 shaku to 3.0 shaku).
Someday, I'll revisit them and start playing (my therapist has been telling me I should).
Wow. It's been awhile but I used to play either the trumpet, treble baritone, and the saxophone in grade school. I really want to pick up piano soon. One thing I noticed in grade school about band was how many GLBT students were enrolled. If I remember correctly I think it had to do with the choice of either P.E., Band, or JROTC.
:D
I wish! I sing. I am a reasonable contralto but sadly I've no one to accompany me. :(
I play guitar, and was in a band until last week. I sing, but not as much as I did before I tried recording my voice and realized how f*ing HIGH it is - I'm a first soprano. >.<
Emotional reasons? I suppose, it helps calm me down, or gear me up, depending what kind of music I'm playing. Listening to music does that too, but not to such an extent.
I play guitar (not very well) and I do experimental noise stuff with a mic and a bunch of effects pedals.
I played the flute for nine years, starting in grade school. Also took up the violin for two, and was rather adept at that. I played the glockenspiel for several years with my grandfather, who helped me build one (that was awesome times, man), and am really hoping to get my hands on a small lap-harp this holiday season - something I've wanted to play since I was a little kid.
I wish I could sing. It's one of my biggest dysphorias, actually. That no matter how hard I tried, and no matter what I did, the best I could sound was like a low female tenor with a head-cold. I gave up on it years ago (shortly after being kicked out of women's choir in high school, the teacher apparently didn't feel like dealing with a lone tenor in a group of 59 sopranos).
I play the ukulele. :) My dad bought me a uke for my birthday and now it's one of my favorite things to do.
Unfortunately, I'm too shy to sing... I blame my high voice.
I play acoustic guitar, mandolin, fiddle, banjo, dulcimer... I play professionally and teach, however even if I did something else for a living, I'd still play for myself. Music keeps me sane (OK, maybe not exactly sane) ;D
Z
I sing :) And yes, the voice is an instrument.
I also play the piano... sort of
Alexie
i've been playing piano since i was 7. i also play the violin.
I play the ukulele.
Wow, and you're willing to admit that in public. Good for you. Since it took so much for you to come out like that, here is a friend of mine who also plays the Uke.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC1og49c0c8&feature=related# (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC1og49c0c8&feature=related#)
And this guy is just awesome, playing While My Guitar Gently Weeps, at Strawberry Fields, the John Lennon memorial in Central Park, NYC - let it inspire you, this guy rocks it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puSkP3uym5k&feature=related# (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puSkP3uym5k&feature=related#)
Haha! The uke is so underrated Tekla. ;)
And Jake! I love Jake! He is totally epic; one of my uke heroes.
Quote from: tekla on December 10, 2009, 11:41:36 AM
I play the ukulele.
Wow, and you're willing to admit that in public. Good for you. Since it took so much for you to come out like that, here is a friend of mine who also plays the Uke.
Kat, I like your friend's song!
I forgot to list it in my list, I play a little uke too...
Jake is great!
Z
If my memory serves me correctly, Paul McCartney and George Harrison played uke as well.
If my momory serves me correctly, Paul McCartney and George Harrison played uke as well.
While I don't know about your Mom, my memory serves me that Paul McCartney, who could have had about half of the women in the world, got married to Heather Mills. 'Nuff said. But if you need more, one word: Wings. OK, still not enough? He let Linda sing in Wings. Sure she was turned way down (well below the range of human hearing) in the mix, still...
And Uni is great. She just loves doing it so much you can't but help going to that happy place yourself. She does lots, and lots, and lots (because she is easy and requires no equipment) of events/parties/things/salons in SF. And she travels the world going into some of the most dive bars in some of the worst places and does what she does and everybody loves her. I know there is vid tape of her playing the Fillmore, so I asked her why that wasn't on Utube instead of that really bad Helsinki deal I posted above, her reply was: "Everyone has Filmore tapes, I played Helsinki." So there you have it.
Tekla you're dissing one of my heroes >:-)
Paul and his band Wings stayed near my home in Tennessee early on while recording in Nashville. He really is a great guy to talk to and be around. And he does play the ukulele as well as several other instruments. Most musicians would not want their spouse to go on the road with them-I admire him for that.
I like the guitar in your pic. I play my gibsons more than the others and have a strat body Epi that sounds and plays as well as my Les Paul. I use it for my backup and for bright tones it is my #1-even better than my strat-thru both my 50 watt Marshall (4x12s)and my 45 watt Boogie (4x10s).
I play everything ^-^
Not really...i don't have that many instruments, but i can pick up most instruments and do something with them...
Mostly, I play piano and guitar. i have taken lessons before, for piano at least, but I always found them to slow or boring so I have mostly taught myself. I've found that once you figure out the scales you can play just about anything, at least within that specific scale. i'm not amazing at transitioning between scales though...
I like piano alot and do random classical style stuff, but i havn't had alot of time to practice. I usually end up playing guitar instead because i am just better at it and more practiced. Every now and then i'll do something heavy metal but I'm better doing the blues or steve ray vaughn type stuff. i rarly play someone elses stuff, i just improvise, its to tiresome to learn something by tabs. Maybe when I have more time i'll learn some stuff by ear though. I do like to just play along with a song though, adding my own stuff.
I'm self-taught on piano, and can play reasonably euphoniously. I prefer 19th century romanticism because it tends to be fairly forgiving of mistakes and can take rubato. It's my main instrument.
I'm almost entirely self-taught on guitar as well, though I took a few lessons after I had already gotten the basic hang of it. I play some classical (Fernando Sor studies and the like), but mostly just jam away at pop/folk/blues/etc. that you can sing along to.
I sing a lot. I've been in at least two choirs for most of the last decade. I sing tenor mostly, and it kind of kills me. Definitely a dysphoric experience, but singing is such a euphoric experience that it works out. At least I don't have to wear bloody tuxedos any more. But it's weird being the one woman singing tenor. It's not just that the parts are gendered, but a lot of music (about half of the vocal music Brahms ever wrote, for instance) is highly gendered in subject and form. Choir directors have an understandable but annoying tendency to say things like, "Men! I want to hear you from your entrance at measure 59!" Like I said, dysphoric. I'm working on the upper part of my range so that one day I might be able to sing alto without it being a stretch.
When I was little I took lessons in violin -- eight years in total -- and I stopped because it was just too damned hard. I regret it somewhat, and definitely want to have another go at it. I think it's the most beautiful instrument there is. But it is so unforgiving. Everything from tone to phrasing to intonation is difficult, and it sounds awful when you mess any of them up.
--
When I'm not totally down in the dumps, any instrument will do as a wonderful way to relax and open up and let go of whatever is bothering me. When I'm really down, though, it's awfully hard to play. There was a movie, "Elephant," that was more or less about the Columbine shooting, and there was a scene where one of the shooters plays most of Für Elise, and then stops abruptly, banging out a some dissonant notes. I'm not sure how other people saw that, but to me it was immediately obvious the way he was looking to music for some succor, but couldn't maintain the concentration to play an instrument.
The green-eyed monster is whispering, If only I had been allowed to learn.....
Mostly guitar. Have also played bass and drums. Messed about with piano and flute
Quote from: Hannah on December 08, 2009, 06:12:53 PM
...and does it make you feel better?
Do you play anything? Is it rewarding for you on an emotional level or just something you do for fun?
digging into the classic TS posts today and found this....
Yes it does make me feel better. It's very rewarding emotionally and spiritually. I love to channel creative energy, and yes it's fun....
Bass guitar primary instrument, secondary would be guitar and keyboards...
C -
Piano, yeah it's stress management... or used to be when I played more
Does the male organ count? >:-) :laugh:
Quote from: Devlyn on May 18, 2019, 01:42:57 PM
Does the male organ count? >:-) [emoji23]
Question; What is worse than a lobster on your piano ?
Answer ; A crab on your organ!
Now that was a bad joke, but my timing was impeccable.
Sent from my SM-G930F using Tapatalk
I play tenor sax in a concert band.
I used to play hammered dulcimer, but I would need a lot of practice to take it up again. I made a CD of dulcimer music back in the day, but I'd have to relabel and repackage the discs I have left, since they are all in my dead name.
And a long, long time ago, I played clarinet in high school and in the base band when I was in the Air Force.
My mother tried to teach me the piano when I was little, but she wasn't a good teacher and I wasn't a good student. I never did learn to read more than one note at a time. I am not bad reading single parts, like for wind instruments.
On the hammered dulcimer, you can play two notes at once, since you have a hammer in each hand, but you can't read music and play the instrument at the same time. All my learning on that instrument was done by ear and muscle memory.