A little music history

I first became interested in playing piano when I was 10. My first piano was a CASIO CT-X5000. It was a 61-key electric piano with non-weighted keys. It also had a lot of sound presets that I could mess around with at the time.

I started learning how to play piano by essentially copying from YouTube. I became obsessed with those falling notes videos. This video, for example:

The falling notes made it very fun and straightforward to learn piano as a complete beginner when I didn’t know how to read sheet music. I’ve been obsessed with these falling-note piano visualizations ever since. I’ve always wanted to use them to maybe visualize other songs.

The first piece I ever learned on piano was Pachelbel’s Canon in D. It might sound cliché now, but back then, I found it very melodic and somewhat catchy, which is the sound I really liked.

For my first two years of playing piano, I exclusively learned piano pieces using MIDI visualizers on YouTube. I also learned some music theory as part of my school’s curriculum. So I could, to some extent, read musical notes from sheet music. That said, I found it very difficult to read sheet music at that time. I want to give a shoutout to MusicalBasics, the channel that inspired me to play piano and has had some influence on my musical style today.

That changed when I started taking formal piano lessons at 12. Although I had only recently joined the class, I had prior experience and could play some fairly challenging pieces, such as Mozart’s Turkish March and level 5 of MusicalBasics’ simplified Canon in D. Therefore, I just needed to familiarise myself more with reading sheet music.

The first piece I learned in lessons was Summer by Joe Hisaishi. I learned his exact arrangement from sheet music:

My second piece was Beethoven Virus:

Now, this might seem like a huge leap, and it was. It was substantially harder to learn than anything else I’d learned, but it’s still one of my best pieces, and I can perform it to this day.

To dial things back, I didn’t learn anything else as difficult. Instead, I delved into some classical pieces and pop songs. One of the pop songs that I can still play to this day is Symphony by Clean Bandit. I learned this arrangement, which I can still perform today.

It is worth noting that I learned over 30 pieces and songs. However, I can only perform about 5 confidently. The five I can still play confidently are the ones that hold special memories or that I find particularly impressive to perform.

I continued honing my piano skills, playing and practicing, until end of 2023, when my teacher moved away and my lessons ended there. However, I made a commitment to keep practicing piano. Lately though, I’ve been more and more busy with classwork, so I couldn’t practice piano as much as I used to.

Eventually, my progress in learning other people’s music slowed down considerably. But that wasn’t the end of my musical journey. In fact, it was the beginning of something new.

In the next post, Where the Music Is, I explore how I went from playing other people’s music to writing my own.