Learning to play the keyboard

by Utkrishta Mulmi

We have had flute, madal and guitar classes and now we are having keyboard classes as well. Part of the reason for doing this is to learn about music and its notations and how it is used in different cultures. Our teacher for this class is Sajin sir. Vidheha had already been learning keyboard with him and now I am going to join the class. Over three days, I have learned to play “Baa, Baa Black Sheep,” Vidheha and I have learned about the treble clef and the bass clef. I use the right hand to play the treble clef and the left to play the bass clef.

We have learned that the notes that go on the staff of the treble and bass clef and the ones. The notes that go into the staff line are E, G, B, D, F and the notes that go in between the lines are F, A, C, E. The notes that go on the bass staff lines are G, B, D, F and the notes that go in between are A, C, E, G. We have learned that an octave is a whole line that ends with the note it started such as C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C.

I am in this class at 10:30 right after the flute lessons that last until 9:30 and boxing lessons that are immediately afterwards. The class ends in an hour. Though Vidheha does not pay much attention in class as she is just going on to four, she can play a lot of rhymes on the flute and the keyboard. We also practice madal every day. I have made lots of notations for us to learn and we are going to learn all those notations.

I think I am getting a good music base. I have learned Nepali notations like sa re ga ma on my flute for about 2 years and I am starting to learn English notations like C, D, E, F, G in this year. After learning the music alphabets now I am learning the Western musical symbol based notations. I can play madal and little bit of guitar too. Over the past two years I have researched music notations for Nepali songs, their lyrics, and downloaded some so that we can play them and sing them too. Research helps me a lot and right now we have a project under which I have to place everything on Google drive along with the Periodic Table manual that we have created and the biological classification manual that we have prepared.