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Comment by coward123 | Hacker News Reader

May I ask - did you have a previous background in music? When I think of my own experiences and those of not only my kids but other musicians I've observed, two years is really just a starting point (IE: you should not have expected to have any degree of proficiency unless you already have considerable musical background)

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No, I started out with violin, then moved to piano, did nothing for 5 years, then played saxophone for 17 years and then stopped for a couple of decades.

The big difference between violin and say piano is that with a piano if you hit a key with a certain velocity it will make a certain sound. Over and over again. On the violin it isn't nearly that simple and just forming the tone will take a long time (in a way you never stop getting better at that).

That's a really interesting observation you make, and one where I'll have to think on it for a bit. One of my thought exercises on this is to think about Glen Gould vs. Simone Dinnerstein's interpretation of Bach's Goldberg Variations. There's something I like about the way Dinnerstein hits those keys that is different to my ear than Gould.

There is the myth of 'touch', the problem with the myth is that the piano was designed with the very explicit goal of eliminating it, just like it's predecessor, the harpsichord.

http://forum.pianoworld.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/3139/can-a...

A fun illustration of this with violin is this TwoSetViolin video [1] where they and 8 non-violinist musician friends play a game similar to "Telephone". They split into two teams each consisting of one of the TwoSetViolin violinists and 4 of the others.

Each round one of the violinists plays a simple melody for one non-violinist member of the other team. Then that person takes the violin and tries to play it for another non-violinist member of their team and so until the last non-violinist plays it for the violinist on their team. If the violinist can identify the piece their team gets a point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJYaYHmCmAE

Oh that brings back some painful memories, hilarious though, and some of them are surprisingly good! (and some are just horrific). The most clear memory I have from those days is that during one of the lessons one of the violin teachers dogs keeled over and died. I think she blamed me for that...

It also makes me wonder if I would be able to get any sound out of a violin today.

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