Did you ever do piano lessons as a child?

my parents knew that i was musical, but despaired of trying to get me to train it. i had recorder lessons, violin lessons, piano lessons, flute lessons, singing lessons, and i bunked them all.

the bass guitar - an instrument which at one point my father actually tried to actively DISSUADE me from playing - was the one thing i never had a single lesson on, and is still my favourite instrument to play. because no one ever hassled me to play it, i would sit and play it for hours when i'd never ever practised anything else.

fast fingers is urgent and key... i wonder if my current typing speed ability has anything to do with those wonderful protodrone atonal toneburst finger exercises that i used to do for hours...

Once my lessons stopped I totally stopped playing and lost all confidence in myself that I could produce anything from it anyway.

I refused to play anything in a major key

Haha spot the future Radiohead fan...

I still really want to learn Bruce Haacks mass for solo piano if I can find sheet music anywhere.

(BTW, what's the deal with organs? They're like the greatest thing ever but no one wants to learn them anymore. In '88/'89 I remember all kinds of kids at the music school learning organ. By the time I'd started teaching there 10 years later, not a single one. I don't think there's an organist in the program here.)

I haven't touched a piano in a long time. I'm on guitar now.

Now I play Christmas Carols once a year at mum and dad's as that is the only access I have to a piano. I love Christmas Carols. I quite like the piano, to play - I hate listening to piano music though.

I really liked her. That is, when I practiced. When I didn't, her wrath was a scary, scary thing. I learned a lot of cool Russian expletives.

Nowadays I can't read music at all, although I remember where middle C is. I'm hoping to master 'In C' by Terry Riley any year now...

(often, with boring things like scales and exercises I'd have a magazine or a book open alongside the music, so I could read something interesting whilst I practiced)

i started from age 5 and kept having lessons until about 3 years ago (when i was 19 i went on holidays to thailand and didn't tell my teacher when i got back. oh dear. then one day i bumped into her at a recital and things got really ugly.)

i was sorta pushed into being semi-serious about it, not by my parents really, but my teacher was hugely into it. @ 14 i went to sydney to work with a russian woman called mira whose walls were covered in icons (and there was mouldy food in the fridge). i had my first solo recital that year in someone's house and another proper one @ 17 in a hall with the curtains and the getting flowers after and all that jazz. i also entered the dandenong festival for youth eisteddfod every year, and got prizes! the best one was coming third in the visyboard under 25s - because i placed i was asked to perform at local mogul richard pratt's mansion for the visyboard employees and their spouses. at the end they gave us $1000 each, to encourage youth! haha now that i think about it this is how i paid for my trip to thailand.

I do feel that piano lessons are far too spency. It's a licence to print money it seems.

Lesson Day was traumatic. I remember it getting to four o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon and Mum would sit me on the stool and shout at me while I cried onto the ivories and tried to remember my pieces (I never looked at the music - I'm still shite at sight reading).

Suddenly, at about age 13 I started to enjoy it. The trigger was my first piece of Mozart, which I adored. God, I was such a square. From then on an hour a day or more was no problem. I kept up the lessons until I was about to take my 'A' Levels.

My teacher was (still is) lovely. I regret a bit that she told me exactly how to play each piece, never discussed it with me or asked what I thought, and even worked out every single fingering pattern before I started. Given a piece of music today, I can play the notes but wouldn't have a clue where to pedal, play loud or soft and stuff.

Anyone else who's done Grade 5 theory - were you as amazed as me that you have to sit at a desk, not a piano, while you do the composition bit?

I want to take more lessons when I go to college, from a teacher who will really make me do stuff, so I hope it's not incredibly expensive/reserved only for music majors.

I admit that there's a cheesetastic fascination with those organs now in much the same way that an old Casio is kind of cool, but man, I don't really want to learn that as a serious instrument.

After my teacher insisted I should practise for an hour a day I slumped off to my bedroom in total despair, and wept endlessly. Only then did my parents seem to realise how much I loathed it and allowed me to stop. I was repeatedly told I'd regret stopping when older. I don't.

we only had an organ to practice on at home, which at the time was a) annoying because it made it hard to practice piano sort of stuff, and b) awesome because it had all these switches and stuff that made it make difft noises. but I never did really 'learn' anything proper about it.

my present-day piano teacher -- who is more than three decades younger than me, which is also fun -- currently has a placement at CERN!

so i am expecting more xenakis and less bach when he returns (it's the cloud experiment project, so debussy is still cool)

(for long-time readers, he is dr vick's little nephew, now all grown-up nearly) (since among other things he is now like 6'6")