Maybe I should back up a bit before I answer that.
When I was about 8 or 9 years old my parents bought me a guitar. Actually, they didn't actually buy me the guitar, they bought me guitar lessons and the guitar was mine only as long as I continued with my lessons. It was a Takemine six string, a popular beginner model even to this day, and I'll never forget the night I took my first lesson and brought it home, being much too excited to eat my dinner or even to join my brothers to watch Batman on TV (the TV series with Adam West, not the movie. This was a long time ago folks). Needless to say I continued on with my lessons until the music teacher moved away, and continued on with another teacher for a couple of years before he died of a sudden stroke. After that my learning was pretty much hit-and-miss, picking up what I could where I could, but I never got rid of that guitar, and to this day I still have it and dust it off every now and then to give it a strum or pick out of few notes.
When I was a kid I also had a neighbor who had a piano in his living room. No one in his family played it, and it sounded like it hadn't been tuned since around VJ-Day, but every now and then I'd sit down at the keyboard and plunck a few keys until my friend's big brother, who wasn't a happy brother and never happy to see either me or my friend, would come downstairs and yell that I wasn't supposed to be playing it.
Anyways, that was the sum total of my childhood keyboard experience. I used to ask my parents if we could have a piano, but we weren't rich and it simply wasn't in the budget. Still, I always wanted to learn how to play the piano.
Which brings me to last week.
I got some Best Buy gift cards again for christmas last year, which, by the way, is the best present in the world for someone like me. I'm not a geek, but I certainly do like my electronics. Trouble is I never know what to spend my gift cards on. I figure a gift card is a good chance to buy a "want" instead of a "need", so I always hate to spend them on anything practical. So there I was wandering the aisles of the local Best Buy trying to decide if I really needed another MP3 player (I don't - I've got 4 already), and I turned a corner and there it was. The Yamaha YPT-400 keyboard.
In an instant my childhood yearning came rushing back to me. No muscle car or Harley for me - no, a piano has always been the object of my heart's desire. It's a beginner's model. Just 61 keys and not a lot of the fancy doodads that a pro might use. I don't think this is the sort of keyboard that Rick Wakeman would be interested in (and if you know who Rick Wakeman is then congratulations! You qualify for our special AARP discount). It's plenty good for me, though, considering I don't know how to play, and it has more functions and features than I'll ever be able to figure out.So I brought it home and set it up on the living room table, and quickly realized that the living room table wasn't going to work. It was too high. What I needed was a keyboard stand, which takes me to the real point of this particular post. I figured that the best place to buy a keyboard stand was at a music store (Duh) so off I went off to the local Guitar Center store. If you've never been to a Guitar Center store before, and I hadn't, then I guess you can think of it as sort of a Rock 'n Roll Fry's. The San Jose store is huge with just about every concievable type of guitar, bass, drum kit, keyboard, amp, etc... for the budding Alvin Lee or Aynsley Dunbar (and if you know who Alvin Lee and Aynsley Dunbar are then congratulations! Qualified seniors get 10% off).
Anyways, I picked up a nice little folding stand for around $40, and on my way out of the store I looked up and there they were - such stuff as dreams are made. You see I was lying before about the piano. Sure, I always wanted a piano, but that wasn't my ultimate dream. You see, the real object of lust in my life has always been the Gibson Les Paul guitar. I had my Takemine acoustic, but you couldn't really jam with a Takemine acoustic. For that you needed a something like a Strat or a Les Paul, and I always liked the warm tones and sexy good looks of the Gibson. Trouble was, I was poor and they were always way out of my price range.
As I was walking out of the store, though, I passed by the guitars and there were all these LP's up there on the wall, and all of a sudden the drool started to run down my chin and on to my shirt and my heart started beating faster and faster, and I could see myself up on that stage with my LP wailing away like some kind of rock 'n roll god, and then I looked at the price tags and reality sent me crashing back to earth. Sorry, but $2,000 is too much to pay, especially for a guy who's picked up a guitar maybe twice in the last 20 years. So I shrugged and started to walk out, but before I could make the door I took a last glance over at the Epiphone Les Paul's they had displayed in the middle of the showroom, and...
Bingo! Sure, the materials aren't as good and they're factory made, but the Epiphones are also $1,500 less than the Gibsons, and they look and play just about the same. And that, my friends, was my male menopause moment. The little kid in me won out over the sober adult, and I bought myself a transparent blue Epiphone Les Paul Standard. If I do say so myself, she's a beauty. Of course I can't remember a single song I used to play anymore, but I do remember a lot of the chords and a few of the licks, so what the heck. The first day I brought it home I played for about 2 hours straight, and was quickly reminded of a time in my life when I used to have callouses on my fingers. When your fingers go raw and start to burn those details come back to you in a hurry, but the callouses will come and, meanwhile, this thing is a gas.
I've still got to get an amp. I didn't buy one at the time because that damn store was so noisy I couldn't hear myself think. I'll just go back sometime when it's a little quieter to try a few out. And I've still got my keyboard too. I'm shopping around for some piano lessons right now, but in the meantime I picked up a piece of software called "Teach Me Piano" which is pretty good at teaching basic fingering and note reading. I'm finishing up lesson 2 right now, and my fingers aching. I can barely type this blog tonight. That keyboard is a lot of fun though.
In fact, with all the musical tools and instruments and websites and software out there right now, what I can't figure out is why in the world are kids going out an buying something like "Gitaroo Man" (or whatever it's called). I was in Fry's the other day and kids were lined to play that thing, and meanwhile about ten rows down they had all these amazing consumer level keyboards, which, in my opinioin, would be a hell of a lot more fun and creatively rewarding than a video game. You know, when we were kids (uh-oh, here it comes), we would have killed to have something like a Yamaha YPT400. I mean, if you wanted to learn the piano, you had to buy a PIANO, you know what I mean. Now, for around $200 you can buy a 61 key full sized keyboard with all kinds of digital effects and accompaniments and whatever else you might need, and all these things do is sit around and gather dust.
Geez, what's wrong with these kids today.
Oh well, like I said, my fingers are killing me so I'm gonna have to stop typing now. The plan is to get some piano lessons, and then maybe a mixer of some kind and some software for the computer and who knows - maybe I'll be uploading something to Garageband or the Podsafe network someday. Unfortunately, I've got a lot of catching up to do between here and there, but they say you're never too old to learn. Right?
Right?
1 comment:
Qualified seniors get 10% off.
OK, that was mean. But I laughed.
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