Practice -The Necessary Pain!

Frequently, around this house, there are discussions that crop up and I wonder where in blazes whichever child it might have been who started asking questions about various things, came up with some of these issues that have been broached recently.

A couple of days ago Maya hit me with one of her marathon "Question and Answer" session starting out with what seemed like a fairly inconsequential question -"What's a French Horn?" So I tried to explain that instrument to her and then she asks me if I knew how to play one of 'em. Well, I told her that I had learned to play the French Horn, yes but not for very long. The next question -progressing along fairly normal here -was "Well, did you take lessons Gram?" followed by "Is it hard to play it?"

Hmmm. I was seeing a pattern starting here, ya know. I told her that yes, I had taken lessons and yes, it was hard to learn to play at first but then, ALL musical instruments are hard to play at first!

Then, she wanted to know if her Mom played any instrument(s) too and I told her yes, that her Mom had taken clarinet lessons for a while in elementary school and even played for a time in the elementary school band too. Then she wanted to know what other, if any, instruments I had lessons for and I told her I had taken violin lessons, also in elementary school for 3 years plus, at about that same time, I had also taken piano lessons as well. Yeah, the well-rounded musician, huh?

Then she started talking about how maybe she might like to take some kind of lessons to learn to play some instrument but she was trying to figure out which instrument would be easy to learn to play.

Again, I told her, with a little more emphasis on the ease of learning to play anything right means practice, practice, practice.

After which she switched gears here a bit and mentioned about the guitar her Dad had seen fit a few years ago to get for her older half-sister and that maybe she could learn to play that then?

Oh brother! Her sister and that guitar had been a bit of a disaster in that I think she may have picked it up and tried to follow her dad's instructions for the basics of the instrument for maybe about 10 tries and then, when she didn't sound like Eric Clapton or some other musician, that guitar was stuffed back into her closet, never to resurface again.

Now it wasn't a bad guitar but it definitely was not a guild f512 that he had purchased for her. But he couldn't get the message across to her -nor could I -that all great musicians tend to sound pretty crappy when they first start to learn to play ANY instrument and you have to work -really, really hard, for a long time usually too, before you can play even half way decently!

And I can see the writing on the walls here with Maya and the musical instruments too -as she is not only like her half-sister in her lack of wanting to put in the necessary work, but she also comes by that honestly too -from her Grandmother!