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Friday, May 19, 2017

Casio RIP

I bought a Casio keyboard several years ago. It cost me maybe $40-$60 at a store that no longer exists, on sale. It had 66 keys, numerous sounds & countless features I would never use, but it had no dynamic control or sustain pedal so it wasn't responsive to my touch. Yesterday the mechanism that makes the F below middle C make sound gave way, some how, and I don't know how to take it apart or fix it.

It sat for a long time. I bought a jazz fake book (real books they call them now) and started to learn a song, but didn't get very far, and it sat for a long time. In August of 2015 pet-sitting at my girlfriend's house for a week, feeding the chickens, etc... I started to play her electric piano, an old Yamaha, and wrote my first song. I guess I had been looking at internet sites on jazz piano because I knew what a ii-V-I was, a tritone substitution, that you could substitute iii for I, for example, and that every chord in jazz was a seventh chord, and that you could further extend that to a 9th. That's about all I knew, too, except that there were modes that used the same notes of the key that you were in, and that there were circles of fifths and fours, etc... This is like the first two weeks of music theory or something.

Once I wrote my first song I wrote another two with basically the same chord progression, and when I returned to my own residence I picked up the Casio again and wrote dozens of more songs, a process that has continued to this sad piano-less day. Earlier in this academic year I began piano lessons. My teacher says I improved greatly so who am I to argue.  

I also took voice lessons for two years. Whether I can sing is a matter of debate, but I had made a resolution to study voice several years before, and never did it.  It was

When I think that I will buy a six-pack of craft beer for $9 and change, and do so at times more than once a week, this electric keyboard seems pretty inexpensive in retrospect, so that I wonder why I hesitated to purchase it. I played this thing for hours and hours for 21 months, so much that I broke it, in fact. Despite its cheapness and inadequacy, I could use it to write music on and practice a multitude of things.  It never went out of tune. I would say I could have put nearly 900 hours on it. I know I rarely used it less than an hour a day for over 600 days, so it cost me 18 cents an hour.

I could still use it as long as I don't care about that F.  


5 comments:

Vance Maverick said...

RIP. I recently moved up to a Roland FP90, and it's pretty great, though it would work out to about $3 an hour by the same estimate.

Jonathan said...

It looks like it about fifteen hundred. It's a possibility for me though I'd really like a Kimball real piano. What sis you have before?

Vance Maverick said...

Yamaha NP30, quite cheap and not bad considering the price, but it started having electrical problems. The Roland is on another level entirely.

Vance Maverick said...

Meant to add that a used real piano is better value unless you need to be able to use headphones, as I do.

Jonathan said...

I guess I could test the tolerance of my neighbors. I go to the music building to play now or to the student union if i am in the mood for bystanders to be subjected to may playing. Thanks for the recommendations