I’m not an accomplished musician in any sense of the term. I learned how to play flutophone in 4th grade. Took Clarinet in band in 5th and 6th grades. In my late teens /early twenties I learned to play guitar a little bit but never really learned to play with others in a group. In October 95 I started playing the recorder and played that almost every day for about ten years and started to taper off.
Recently when at the parent’s house I was seeing an old guitar and thought about the idea of getting back into music. Guitar is nice but you have to deal with picks or calloused fingers. The recorder was fun but too much saliva and also the pain of having to get new corks on the wooden ones. I thought about maybe a portable keyboard which was an idea but not quite hitting home.
Thought about a xylophone. I was thinking of metal bars for sound but turns out a xylophone technically is wooden bars, the toys that have metals bars and are called xylophones are mis-labeled. (The word xylophone means wooden tone) Metal bar instruments are glockenspiels.
Anyway got a somewhat cheap 27 key glockenspiel. In all the instruments in the past I learned in a similar pattern. Start with simple songs, like merrily we roll along, and work your way up to learn the instrument. Using sheet music the whole way and using the written music most of the time. This time I wanted to do something different. The glockenspiel is harder than other instruments I’ve used before with sheet music because I have to look at the keys to play and can’t be looking at sheet music at the same time. I can hunt and peck with sheet music but I also want to just play it more free form. Work on just banging on the keys and learning the sounds and developing patterns. Also I’ve never learned to get a full ear for picking out music just for listening too it. It’s always been a bit tedious and having sheet music is easier (for me at least). So I want to just play along with other music more often.
I’ll still play from the sheets but want to make it as often just playing around rather than just reading new songs and only playing by rote from them. Different for me. I’ll never be a great musician but it is still fun to dink around with. I’m enjoying just drumming on the keys enough that I did also decide to order a 15 key wooden xylophone. That should be fun as well.