There are many reasons why someone decides to buy a piano. Perhaps you want to start taking lessons and need an instrument of your own to do so. Or, you’ve been playing for years and decide that it’s time for an upgrade. Maybe your child is of age to start piano lessons and you’d like to buy an instrument for them. […]
The piano may be your vessel to create beautiful and unique music. If there are problems with your instrument, you won’t be able to produce the elegant sounds that your heart sings with. In this post, we’re going to cover common problems that pianists encounter with their instruments. We will include some basic solutions, but many issues will require that you call in a professional piano repair person. […]
Humans crave simplicity. We crave complexity too, but under very different circumstances. The beauty of simplicity is that it’s easy to understand, and understanding things easily is important to our survival. Simplicity is especially useful in language, because tight definitions allow us to convey information in fewer words. I once had a friend ask me what the “shape that was like a square but two sides were longer and the other two were shorter” was; [...]
Parenting is one of the most challenging and rewarding things you can do. There’s a funny link between challenging and rewarding; the more difficult something is, the more fulfilled we’ll often feel when we’ve accomplished what we set out to do. This makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint; pleasure is derived from accomplishments because those accomplishments might help us or the next generation survive. This is part of the reason it’s so incredibly rewarding to [...]
Music algorithms are a funny thing. Ostensibly, they exist to help us discover new music that’s suited to our tastes. The problem with the idea is that the algorithms curate based on tastes that you already have, using songs that already exist within defined parameters as a starting point to steer you towards other music that fits the mould of those parameters. The problem with this is clear: while you can discover a lot of [...]
There’s a lot that goes into understanding a piece of music. First, you listen to it; you let the melody take you away, you move your feet to the beat. Deeper yet, your second and third listens; you begin to notice subtle nuances, flourishes that had passed you by on the first listen. This continues each listen; some pieces you can listen to hundreds of times and continue to unlock secrets, it’s meaning changing as [...]