I started to play the above piano piece. It is called “Comptine d’un autre été L’après midi” by Yann Tiersen.

Basically, my biggest problem is that I don’t have time to practice. So I took a lot of short cuts. For example, for this piece, it does not require a lot of changes on the left hand. I only have from 10 to 30 minutes each day to play with the piano. Usually at noon time when I go back from work. I’d play for a while before lunch. After lunch, Ashley would be sleeping. In the afternoon, maybe I can get less than 10 minutes to play before dinner. Then it will be Alantha’s turn to play.

Note I used “play with piano” to describe my role. I just can not call this “practicing”. As soon as I can play with both hands, I started to try some difficult pieces, this turbe boosted my progress. It would take months of hard practicing if not years for others to even dare to try pieces like this. But since I do not want to be a piano master, I just want to have some fun. This approach works perfectly.

I need to copy some songs from my iPod Classic 80GB to the Mac.  Many programs fail to work here, for example, ipoddisk, isynctunes, etc (since the iPod is very new).

One software works greatly is called Senuti, I don’t know the meaning of this word, but it does what it was meant to do.  One tiny thing to note is that since I have many songs with Chinese titles, they became unrecognizable in iTunes.  The solution is simple, in the “preferences” menu, select “Always add songs to iTunes Library” and “Add Songs to Playlist” under “iTunes”.

I guess Apple’s concern about allowing people to copy songs from ipod to itunes is to prevent piracy.  It really doesn’t make sense.  Suppose my friend has an iPod, and would like to share the songs for me, it is easy to use the iPod itself as a hard drive and copy everything to my machine.  The only reason I wanted to copy songs from iPod to iTunes would be

1. My computer crashed, or
2. I need to copy songs among several computers and still keep the ratings, playlists, etc.

In both cases, Apple’s decision makes it very difficult for the consumers to perform legitimate actions with their own songs.

Due to my busy schedule in the summer. I did not get enough chances to practice.

But I managed to learn to play a few simple songs (oh, far beyond “twinkle twinkle little star”, “silent night” and “money isn’t everything”, these three appear in almost all introductory books, I could play them on the second day when I touched the piano).

I tried to practice with Czerny’s 599. I started from #11, reached the #20 in two days. They are quite easy if you use your knowledge in chords to play the left hand (my guitar experience got me some millage here).

Then I switched to play some songs I know, by adding simple left-hand rhythms. They sound amazingly nice! For example, “Everything I do, I do it for you” involves C, G, Dm, Fm. In the simplest case, pressing the 3 keys together once with the left hand in every measure gives nice sound, of course, right hand needs to play the melody, which is not hard for this song.

The next step is to practice the separation of the left and right hand. This is quite difficult for adults, because we are not trained (no other tasks need us) to use the two hands differently, especially when the keys are not hit in the same rhythm. There are two ways to deal with this: (1) play very slowly, but make it right (2) play both hands till you don’t have to think about the keys, then put them together. I found (1) is quite useful to me. (2) can be combined with (1).

Once I can play one song without any problem (usually in C), I experiment to play it in D and G. This way, I learn how to introduce the black keys, and be familiar with the sharps and flats. I’ll wait till I can play better in C to move on to add more sharps and flats.

I’ll try to put up some videos, but I simply don’t have to process a video now. To many things are going on, and there are at least 5 things reaching the deadline on Oct 3. So I’ll have to wait a little bit.

During summer, I was traveling extensively.  From HK to Chicago, San Diego, LA, to Singapore, to Beijing, to Shanghai, to Boston, Minneapolis.  There wasn’t time to practice.

I used the time to read some music theory.  Basically, I think the following points need to be understood

1. chords, how they are formed
2. how chord inversion works
3. key signatures, scales
4. music notations, especially rhythm

I used to play guitar, so chords are not difficult to me, I found the chords in piano is much easier than in guitar.

Chord inversion helps to reduce the hand movement, it can be very useful when you have to change the chord frequently.

An understanding of key signatures is useful, it is not that urgent to practice everyone of them, when there is a need, I can quickly start

There are some software packages to help people with the rhythm, I tried EarMaster, the exercise asks you to hit the space key on your computer keyboard to produce rhythms shown in the software.  It is useful, especially when you want to try a new song that you never heard.

To learn key signatures, a map called “the Circle of Fifth” is extremely useful:

So starting from C, moving clockwise, each new key is the 5th of the old key, each adds a new sharp (#).  So when we reach F#, we have 6 sharps.  This happens to be the same as Gb, which has 6 flats.

The small a below C means that a-minor uses the same key signature as C-major.

This would have been so difficult for kids, but for adults, this is not that hard to understand.

Jade has been very absent-minded recently. I guess it has something to do with her working too much with Excel and PowerPoint till 1am sometimes.

Last week, I scheduled a lunch meeting with Sean, and she insisted to join. I was a few minutes late, when I arrived, she was jumping with my new ipod in one hand, and the the environmentally friends Harvard bag in her other hand. She did not check the lid before she put her drinking bottle into the bag, and the water leaked in the bag. The iPod in her hand is totally soaked. I can see water flowing in the screen, which still shows the “Now Playing” song.

She told me the iPod was off, and I do see the lock was on, so it must be the water that triggered up the iPod. I have heard many dreadful stories of getting iPod wet (or anything electronic device, for that matter), just search for “ipod, water” in google to see how common this issue is.

That was a less-than-one-month new iPod, so I did not want to buy another one. Before I want to take it to Apple service to try my luck (in Hong Kong, it would be a big hassle), I thought about ways to save this one.

The first thing I did was to put it facing down, so the screen and the buttons face the table cloth. This way, the water can flow out rather than diffuse within that metal back cover.

Then after lunch, I asked Jade to take it back and put it together with a dehumidifier in a closet. Jade did not do it, instead, she put it near a fan, and after a while, Nathalie turned off the fan. So when I came back home, the iPod was lying on the table.

I thought about cracking it open and drain the water, but I did not, this not only would devoid my warranty, but also might help the water to reach some sensitive parts in iPod. So I put it into the room with the dehumidifier.

It did not seem to work very well, as the dehumidifier only dehumidifies the atmosphere, even if the humidity is 0, the water would still be trapped inside. So I put the iPod near the vent of the dehumidifier. It blows out warm air. I switched the mode from “Dehumidify” to “Drying”, which was designed to dry cloths. It seems to be working, the next day, there was a box of water extracted by the dehumidifier, and the ipod feels warm, which can be helpful to evaporate the water.

After 2 days, I thought it was safe to turn on the iPod, so I did. It came up and showed a message saying “the iPod has little power left in the battery”. So I plugged it into my computer. The battery appeared to be charged.

But the problem came: after a few hours, the battery was still very low. And iTunes did not recognize the iPod.

So I unplugged the iPod, and put it into sleep. When I did so, I touched the power adapter of my laptop. It was very hot!

I guess the issue was still water, so I left the iPod on the hot adapter. After one day, I touched the iPod, it was very hot too. (The back cover is a piece of metal, no wonder!)

Then I plugged in the iPod again. This time, after charging the battery for a while, iTunes started to Syncronize. After I-don’t-remember-how-many hours, the battery indicates only got half charged. I did not want to charge too much, so I unplugged it, and started to listen to it. I think this has to do with the battery, and I want to manually calibrate it. So I left the iPod on till the battery is drained out of power.

Then I plugged in the iPod, and this time, it got fully charged.

I thus declare that I saved my iPod from drawning.

Something we can learn in the process:

1. Do not crack open the ipod when it’s wet
2. Just keep it warm for water to evaporate, do not use a hair blower (this one can destroy the LCD)
3. Do not shake the iPod forcefully
4. Be patient, be very patient, avoid to turn it on before you are 100% sure it is totally dry inside

How to effectively use iPod to learn piano/guitar is an interesting question.

In iPod/iTunes, I can generally generate playlists and give star ratings to songs I like.  And those with high star ratings should be the ones I focus on learning and practicing.  The question is how can I systematically manage my mp3 library to achieve this goal.

First of all, it is nice to find lyrics and chords for the songs.  And there are many websites offering them for free.  Usually the songs will be listed and there are multiple pages of them.  I wrote a program to grab (1) song name (2) artist name (3) lyrics (4) chords, and store them in a mysql database.  The perl modules I used are LWP, DBD::MySQL (DBI).

Then I can generate a list and search in my mp3 tags for these songs, using MP3::Tag.  http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-cpmp31.html provides an excellent review of the functions to process mp3 files with perl.

Sometimes, the chord file is stored in .rar format.  I can use Archive::Rar to process these files.  First download the file with LWP::Simple’s mirror (’source url’,'newfilename’), then open and extract the content with this rar module.

What if I don’t have the song?  This is a good question, as if a song has a guitar chord, it usually means it is a good song, and I should get it. After matching with my mp3 library, I generate a list of songs to look for (now I have the title and the artist information from the chord library).  I simply search CDDB database to find out the album, and put it on to my wishlist on Amazon, all automatically processed (thanks to the API offered by Amazon).
Since I have thousands of songs, the process described here saves me huge amount of time.  It’s a lot fun to program these too.  The life is so much easier with so many of  ready-to-use perl modules.

I did some research about the books people use to learn piano. For beginners, usually the following are the standard books. Hanon, Thompson, Beyer, and Czerny.

I found Hanon to be unrealistic, as it emphasizes pure hand repetitions. This definitely does not work for me. Subconsciously, I would quickly figure out the pattern and just type the pattern without thinking. And this would make it impossible for me to learn the positions of the notes.

Thompson is for very little kids, so I don’t think this is suitable for adults.

Beyer is very interesting, I think it is quite suitable for me. There are 106 pieces, and I can immediately start to play the pieces between 20 to 40. It usually takes about a year for kids to reach the 106^th, I believe it will be faster in my case.

Czerny has a few books, there is one called 599, one 849, one “24 left hand”, etc. For beginners, 599 is suitable. There are 80 (as I remember) pieces. It starts from very simple pieces, and the first half reaches the same level as Beyer. It takes about two years for kids to finish all 80.

There are many other books, for example, I finished reading “Teach Yourself to Play Piano”. It includes a lot of discussions about music theory, which is very good for me to catch up. There is another one called “How to Learn Music by Ears”, and one called “How to Play Popular Piano in 10 Easy Lessons”. I think there can be many of this kind in the library, I, of course, searched them out on the Internet.

This is the prelude to a series of my piano diaries. In this series of posts, I’ll jot down tips about how I learn piano.

As I said in the last post, I started learning piano after reading serious statistics for sometime. So my approach is very different from traditional ways of learning piano.

First, just comparing my progress with xuanxuan’s, I realized one thing. The traditional way of practicing piano does not work for adults. I don’t have time and the patience to go though the simple repetitions that she uses to get familiar with piano. She can learn for a year just to tap on C D E F, C D E F, E F G -, etc, I really can not.

Second, since my capability of learning is better than hers (she might have a better memory, and maybe better hand-eye coordination), I would like to see how this can help me.

Third, I have experience with guitar, and turned out that this is very helpful.

Overall, while for children we may emphasize practicing, in my case, I would like to win with superior learning methods.

My goals:

I found that for many kids, when they get started, they (and their parents) don’t really have a clue about the goal. They just type the keyboard mechanically like, … well a machine. Then those who are talented would show, and a few of them may pursue piano as the career. My goal is not to reach grade 10 after 8-10 years of practicing, there is no meaning for me to do that. I’m not really in the stage to climb to the acme of the mountain of music. I just want to have some fun with piano, and be able to sing songs, and play simple music like “Canon”, or “Kiss the Rain” (“Kiss the Rain” is not easy, as Jill told me, but compare this with those pieces by List, it is easy). So this method I’m using will be significantly different from those used in traditional piano books. I hope after one year, I would be able to reach this goal. Of course, the idea initiated my learning piano – sing songs with piano, would be reached far sooner than a year.

Yiruma himself playing

The sheet, I can not post the sheet here, even I have it, gotta respect the copyright…

I started to practice piano on July 10th.  The fact that I’m spending some time to learn it is not coincidental.  A few things can be traced as the root of this newly established interest.

In terms of timing, I have worked very hard for the marketing science conference, and when I came back from Singapore, I spent a whole week working on Bayesian Statistics to prepare for making some progress on that project.  Then I felt very tired, as I spent on-average 15 hours a day to read the books/papers and to program.  Between then and my two big trips to Beijing/Shanghai and Boston, I have about one week.  For this one week, I just want to find something for me to relax.  And just about the right time, the piano for xuanxuan has arrived.

In terms of location, there is nothing more convenient to have a piano in your house.

When I was visiting Jill and Gordon in Chicago, we had a lot of fun singing with Gordon playing the guitar.  Jill is a good pianist, she started piano when she was young, and, of course, was taught to learn classic music.  And Gordon mentioned that it was not hard at all to learn to play the chords on piano and use a guitar fake book to accompany singing.  Since we were buying the piano for xuanxuan, I thought maybe I can learn to sing songs on piano.  

The first thing I learned on piano is the prelude part of “Right Here Waiting”.  Then I learned the whole thing of “Everything I Do, I Do it for You”.  It’s really amazing that these only took me one day to figure out.  Of course, I use very crude ways to play them: I play the melody on the right hand, but once I have the chords added on the left hand, they became beautiful music. 

Then I had some idea, maybe I should learn to play piano, not so ad hoc as I was doing then, but really learn to play well.  This starts my journey of figuring out how to learn piano as fast as possible.

If you have an iPod, and want to keep studying new things, you can actually download MIT lectures and watch them.

Just go to this page. You can find a lot of courses to choose from. This is part of MIT’s opencourseware project.

The following is a screen shot for the course “Differential Equations”.