What Instrument(s) do you play?

[Piano]

I also wanted to add to the title "And how long have you been playing", but it won't fit. :(

I play the piano and mainly play Classical and Video Game Music, though I have ventured into Jazz and Pop also. I've been playing since late June/early July 2001 so it is almost a total of four years. I passed my Grade 8 ABRSM last Christmas without Merit or Distiction because I was working on the same three pieces for over a year. Gross, no? :)

As for other instruments, I can play a few chords on the guitar, a few melodies on a Chinese Bamboo flute called a Dizi (sp) and can play Twinkle Twinkle Little star on many other instruments. :) I can play one drum beat decently.

That's about it. How about everyone else?

[Mike]

Every decent musician can keep up a beat on the drums, I find.

I play piano. I don't work at playing as much as composing so I'm a bit behind considering how long I've been learning. But if I really work then I could have grade 8 by this time next year.

And I know a G and an A chord on the guitar (both major). Not wonderful for songwriting...

I think I'll create a custom profile field for everybody stating what instrument they play. How 'bout it?

EDIT: Done! Go to My Controls at the top, then Edit Profile Info on the left hand side to fill it in.

[Piano]

I think I'll create a custom profile field for everybody stating what instrument they play. How 'bout it?

EDIT: Done! Go to My Controls at the top, then Edit Profile Info on the left hand side to fill it in.

That'll make my topic redundant (and my username :() :)

[Mike]

:( Well this is more of a discussion on instruments, not simply a place to state it. Besides, custom profile fields are 'cool'.

These emoticons are quite bad actually, maybe I should get some news ones.

[aerlinndan]

These emoticons are quite bad actually, maybe I should get some news ones.

Please do.

I play piano and have done so since the age of 5. However, I'm in the midst of a revolution on my instrument this summer and will write more about my progress as the summer progresses.

[Guest Nickthoven]

I've been singing seriously for about 5 years now, and made the wonderful transition from boy soprano to high lyric baritone at age 16, almost 17. I was a late bloomer... Anyway, I sing classical repetoire and love the songs of Ives, Barber, Wolf, and would love to get my hands on some minimalistic songs such as John Adams, Philip Glass, etc. I'd love to sing some Nixon in China! I have this one problem with my voice--I have a rather limited range. I cannot sing a low G, and my A-flats and As are tough to produce with any power. Lately, my high Es and Fs are growing easier and now are a breeze. My F# is coming in nicely and I now would not be uncomfortable singing it in a public performance. My G, however, is still forming and I would hate having to solo sing it. I've vocalized up to a B-flat once or twice and I hope some day I will have solid Gs, A-flats, and maybe an A or too. Who knows, my range could shoot up all of a sudden and I could become a tenor!

I also play the piano. To the untrained musician, I am a great pianist. To me and other pianists, I have limited technique. I just read like the wind. Technique is something I've always hated practicing, so I never did it. I taught myself how to play and read music, and have taken 1 year of lessons, where I didn't practice and let down my teacher. I have played in recitals and whatnot, and just recently I have been accompanist for the Bel Canto Chorale. I played for a number of concerts, and sang solos as well!

I play the organ, as of late. I took it up starting in around December 2004 or so. I accompany the church choir of an Episcopal church around here, on either the piano or organ. I'm still teaching my feet how to move around. I have played one full service, when our crappy regular organist(he can't read music very well, and have awful rhythm) was sick. It went magnificently. I have also played one wedding, and I have another in a few weeks and another lined up for August.

I play the guitar as well. I'm not too skilled, but I know most chords and can always pick out a melody. I love playing Stephen Lynch!

I play mallet percussion as well. In the last 2 years of my high school days I was in the Concert Band, behind the xylophone, glockenspiel, and timpani. I learned a lot from these instruments, and my band teacher was a great motivation for me to compose. In the last concert I had with them, we performed a Danny Elfman Medley I wrote. It included Batman, Tales From the Crypt, and the Simpsons. If I ever get the CD, I'll put an MP3 up.

I played the cello in all my middle school years, but didn't have enough room in my high school schedule. I was pretty good, being the principal in 6th and 7th grade. I have not picked up that instrument since 8th grade, however.

That's it. :happy:

[J. Lee Graham]

Well, that's quite a lot!

Regarding your singing: the "problem" you describe is one I know a lot about.

I thought I was a baritone when I was in high school - I learnt a lot of the baritone arias in the operatic repertoire in secret because I was very private about my voice and didn't want people to know I could sing until I was more comfortable about it. I actually sang badly on purpose so that people wouldn't know I was good. I too had been a very good boy soprano - I know I had good solid high-Cs because I remember singing them while listening to opera records and reading the libretti - but again, I did it in secret. Like you, I didn't have very strong "bottoms," especially if I warmed up high or sang mainly in the upper register for a while.

When I got to college, my instructors insisted that I was really a tenor because of the lyric timbre of my voice. Nobody told me how to get tenor "tops," though, and early on I had a lot of trouble with my voice trying to get those high notes you talk about purely from the chest. Anything beyond the standard baritone range was just too tight to rely on. It wasn't until a few years ago that I learnt that what I thought was "falsetto" was actually my undeveloped "head voice," and that those high notes were a mixture of pure head voice with a little chest "weight" pulled in.

Once I learnt the difference and began working on my head voice - and more importantly, on bridging and smoothing over the huge gap between it and my very well developed chest voice - the passagio (that uncomfortable area between about D and F# for tenors that's neither fish nor fowl) and the tops (from G to tenor high C and above) started coming along. If I had a truly operatic voice, I'd be able to muscle those tops by pulling in a lot of chest into them, but it's just not natural for me. I'm pleased to be a good choral singer with solo capabilities. The secret is learning to mix head voice and chest voice from the bottom of your range to the top in proportionate amounts.

That said, I've done some of my best solo work in recent years as - you guessed it - a lyric baritone. Last year I performed Stravinsky's "Canticum Sacrum" as a lyric baritone at Disney Hall with the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group - something I could never have done as a tenor. So it's anyone's guess as to which I really am, and I'm not sure I care. As long as I can sing the part well, I'll sing whatever I'm asked to sing, from baritone to first tenor (and even counter-tenor occasionally), though I'm most comfortable in the middle. My self-training in both voice-types has served me in better stead than any of the private lessons I've taken. I find most voice teachers don't know what to do with voices that aren't obviously one thing or another.

You may find as time goes on that the same is true of you. You may not know the full truth of what your voice is capable of until you're 30 years old - the generally acknowledged age at which a voice becomes truly mature. I encourage you to really explore your voice and its capabilities...and don't be afraid of sounding ugly when you're practicing, as long as you're supporting your tone well and are not doing anything that hurts! When I first found my head voice and started working on it, it was puny, scrapy and kinda ugly, and I had to be careful how I handled it until I learnt how to support it. A little work and perseverance without fear has me now able to float lyrically way up high when I need to in what used to be (and often still are) uncomfortable areas of my voice, such as in "The Flowers" from Britten's "Rejoice In The Lamb," which is becoming one of my specialties. I can also belt a high B-flat that may not be Pavarotti, but it'll make the windows rattle. :) All this, and I still have the same bottoms I always had, good to go pretty much down to A...an area most tenors don't have.

Whatever you do, have fun!

[robtheman5824]

I've played euphonium for about four years now. I can also get around on the piano. By get around I mean play chords.

[Marisa]

Hehe...Lee has discovered the underline function. * laughs *

I started playing piano at six (well, officially - I'd been fooling around on it since three or four), and got through four Suzuki books (ear training-based). Parallel to those, however, was my increasing interest in composition. That, coupled with the solo-performance anxiety I developed at 13, was enough to make me start playing piano recreationally only - other than in one trio when I was 16. I still use the piano to compose almost every day, learn a piece on it once and a while just to play it, and secretly it's probably my favourite instrument, but my technique kinda sucks, and I can't sight-read at all well. Ah well. I don't mind. That's just how it turned out.

My elementary school had a great music program - at the beginning of fourth grade, every student picked a string instrument and we all learned to play together. I went for viola because I had something against the lower instruments (maybe they looked too heavy to carry around), and I thought the violin was too darn high. I continued with the viola through middle school (the music program there was about the only thing worth mentioning from those years really - they were kind of empty and thoroughly sucked). Then once in high school, I capriciously applied to the provincial honour orchestra and actually got in, at the last minute. Okay, so they were a little short of violas, but honestly it was good for my confidence - this was right after I'd stopped being able to perform on piano, and I'd never had a private viola lesson in my life (heck, still haven't). Played in that ensemble for three years, every possible year, as well as a lovely little casual string quartet on and off for three years - and a pit orchestra at one point.

Violin I started in eighth grade officially, and revisited in eleventh after inheriting a family violin. (It needs a lot of repair/restoration work, and so for now I've put it aside, but I made enough progress on it to consider it undeniably one of my instruments. At least for now.)

I also have a recorder, which I use to play along with CDs when I get really bored. My fingerings are probably all wrong, and I've never tried to sight-read with it, but it's fun anyhow.

[CaltechViolist]

I've played piano since I was six, used to be pretty good at it until a devastating series of injuries during my sophomore year of college. I can still sight-read pretty decently, and still try to learn a piece or two once in a while, but overall my technique's gone horribly downhill over the last few years.

Started playing violin when I was 11 or 12, mostly because my younger sister started taking lessons and I didn't want to be one-upped. Gotta love sibling rivalries. Had some lessons, but only started after having played for three years (I was on the 5th or 6th Suzuki book by that time), so it was mostly correcting bad habits that I'd picked up, and I still consider myself a mostly self-taught string player since I really didn't succeed in correcting those bad habits until after I went off to college! I started college playing violin as my main instrument - this was where I played in an orchestra for the first time - but switched to viola after about a year, when I was trying to put together a string quartet and couldn't find a violist. Strangely enough, I had to switch back to violin for the orchestra this year, since there were something like 5 violinists and 12 violists in the freshman class. (That's an incredible number of violists, given that Caltech only has about 200 freshmen each year, and there are no music majors.) At the moment I consider myself mainly a violist, even though I have an amazing violin that used to belong to a professional concertmaster, but still play a student viola that's on loan from Caltech. This is mainly from playing a whole lot of Brahms and other late Romantic chamber music as the violist in a piano quartet for two years.

I played a bit of both flute and low brass in middle school and high school, and picked up the euphonium again for a while in college. Playing percussion in orchestra rehearsals for a few weeks (we normally don't have our percussionists in rehearsals until the last two weeks before the concert) when I had a sprained wrist that kept me from playing viola rounded out my tour of the sections. I also started singing with the glee club last year - I'm one of the stronger singers at the very bottom of the bass range, but have a hard time singing anything above middle C, so I'm very definitely a bass. It turns out I've been a part of all of Caltech's major ensembles at some point or another - I've been in the orchestra, concert band, and glee club, and shown up to a couple jam sessions with the jazz band, playing violin and viola.

Then you can throw in the folk instruments - I play pennywhistle and rababa, though neither with any kind of regularity at all.

At the moment, I'm trying to expand my brass horizons by teaching myself horn over the summer. Feels a bit strange to start learning an instrument only after writing a concerto for it, and I'm still getting used to the much smaller mouthpiece, but otherwise, so far, so good...

[jacob]

I tried the tuba a month ago and strangely wanted to play it like the digeridoo the whole time. Very bad tone, but very interesting. I also got to try an accordion; man those chord buttons are crazy! I've GOT to learn how to build an accordion one of these years.

Two months ago I found a very nice effect playing an english horn like a brass instrument (on the crook, without a reed). That was also when I got my very own first bassoon (having played school instruments for six years). Last school year I mostly found myself playing clarinet, bad tone, no lessons and all, in concert band and in church. I've felt confident about clarinet since my senior year of high school when I made third chair in district band (conducted by David Holsinger). Actually, I felt bad upstaging so many "legit" clarinettists, I really felt like an intruder, and I squeaked a lot.

Last year I also made a brief appearance on flute, having been given a very run-down one for my birthday the year before. It was the musical "Cabaret," and everytime I played in the high register it sounded absolutely dreadful. But my vibrato (transported over from bassoon) made up for that somewhat.

The year before that I got to play Rice's contrabassoon; what a pleasure.

I've also done quite a hack job on playing the saxophones; I have a very embarrassing recording of Graham Fitkin's "Hard Fairy" (for 2 pianos and soprano sax). Among smallish folk instruments, the one to mention that is of interest is musical saw. Ocarina is nice too.

I never really tackled the high brass very successfully because I didn't have patience. For woodwinds I didn't have patience either, but they came easilyer.

I, too began playing piano at the age of six, and right about now, I'm over it. There's so much else I want to do; can you tell? But Rice's smothersome music curriculum forces me to endure lessons for two more years. Perhaps I can substitute harpsichord.

[Marisa]

This is all really neat to read. A lot of us hadn't been over this in nearly enough detail before, I think.

Something I forgot to mention - I used to sing, too, mostly for religious services at the synagogue but also in a couple of school choirs. Around eighth grade I got tired of it and haven't revisited it since.

[PianoGirl]

I play the piano and have been playing it for 1 and 1/2 years. My family can't afford a piano teacher, so i'm self-taught. I like it a lot. I'm teaching 2 of my younger siblings to play also. I've only written two pieces now and they are both for the piano. I'm working on my 3rd, but, i've reached "Composer's Block." :P

I have also played the flute for 2 years. I play it in my school's band.

I was playing the oboe, but quit after 7 months of something because i HATED it. I can't stand that instrument. lol

And finally, i can play a little over 10 chords on a guitar, but not well, i must add.

and I can't sight-read at all well

Melissa, I find that if you want to be able to sight-read better then you should make flashcards of all the notes on the staff (bass clef and treble clef) and just review them over and over until you know em fast without having to think. That really improved my sight-reading. Hope it works for you!

[Wolf_88]

I play the clarinet and i have been playing it for 8 years now. After i finished elementary clarinet i i didn't have the time or money to go to a music high-scool so now im self-thought.

I also play the double-bass for 1 scholl year now. And im progressing very good, mostly because i read the notes better the any other student.

I can play very good at the recorder.

My sister has thought me some piano since she's been playing it for 7 years now. so I can play many songs for first and second year of piano school.

I can keep up rhythm at drums. And i can also play a balkanian/turkish percussion instrument - the "goc". (i don't know how you say it in english but its like a timpani hit on both sides).

And a friend touught me to play flute so i can play it on first grade level now.

[rock_on]

Hi, I'm not as much into composing as some of the memebers on this site but i play many instruments and love them all my favs are the electric guitar which i have played for a year now and baritone sax which i have played for 2 years. But i also play keyboard/piano, acoustic guitar, xaphoon, alto sax and do some percussion work. What im really interested in is taking vocal lessons and trying out the oboe

Beth

[PianoGirl]

Rock_on, let me suggest not playing the oboe. I did for about a year and absolutely hated it. I play the flute and piano and i love those, but i HATED the oboe. so, i wouldn't waste my time on it if i were you....but, i mean you can if you want to.

[Guest BitterDuck]

Rock_on, let me suggest not playing the oboe. I did for about a year and absolutely hated it. I play the flute and piano and i love those, but i HATED the oboe. so, i wouldn't waste my time on it if i were you....but, i mean you can if you want to.

I actually found the obeo to be pretty fun.

[J. Lee Graham]

My understanding is that the oboe is difficult to play well, and unlike many other instruments, the art of making reeds is really part and parcel of the mastery of the instrument.

That said, since I was a teenager, I've had the idea that if I were ever to take up a wind instrument, it would either be the oboe or the horn - arguably the two most difficult instruments in the wind family to master.

Interesting - I just reflected on the fact that my favourite wind instrument by far is the clarinet, yet I have no desire to play it.

[rock_on]

hi, As far as I'm concerned the oboe could be a challenge but if its my goal to be musician ect. I should be open to challenges and take on the oboe

however that is just my opinion and i might very well end up hating it :happy: :happy:

Beth

[Wolf_88]

Originally posted by J. Lee Graham@Jul 20 2005, 12:56 AM

My understanding is that the oboe is difficult to play well, and unlike many other instruments, the art of making reeds is really part and parcel of the mastery of the instrument.

[Guest BitterDuck]

Well my advice to u all is - play as much instruments as u can! I have been playing the clarinet since i was 9 and jus a year ago i ralizied how great it is to know how to pkay an instrument. Not profesionaly just the basics. Not just it helps when u compose but a whole new world is opend in front of u when u learn an instrument. I had a great desire to play the oboe or the flute - but they told me i was too old. So i took up double-bass, and im working great.

So the advice for all the young

[CaltechViolist]

Too old? I'm 22 and just starting to learn to play horn. I know other people who started playing their instruments as late as their 40s.

[Wolf_88]

Too old?

[PianoGirl]

I actually found the obeo to be pretty fun.

hmmmm...i couldn't stand it! lol :) i find that funny that we disagree so much!

[Guest BitterDuck]

hmmmm...i couldn't stand it! lol