Daily Dose of English 220
Music Lessons
Daily Dose of English 220
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about music lessons. This is a viewer-suggested topic. I think it was playing music, the piano, and they asked me to talk about music lessons in the US because they said that in their country they sometimes have music lessons but either they don't really get taught music or nothing actually happens or they're just bad. And so I thought I'd share my experience with various kinds of music lessons coming from the U.S. because that might be interesting. I don't know. So I've always had music as part of my schooling pretty much since the, I think since the third grade. So my, no, that's not true. Even more. Yeah. Yeah, thinking about it, I don't think there was a ton in preschool. I really don't remember that much about preschool though, so I could be wrong. And then going to elementary school, we didn't really have like specific music classes, but I do remember like a sort of a dance music movement class thing. I think we mostly just like, It was sort of like another kind of physical exercise with music, learning a little bit about that. We were still pretty young, so it's really hard to teach young, it's hard to teach young kids that sort of thing. But I remember, because that's where I got a really big black eye. A black eye is where you, if you get punched or hit in your, sort of around your eye area, it's a very sensitive part of your body, and you can get a huge bruise on your eye. Um, and so if you get a black eye, it's like, it's very obvious, right? It's a big like bruise around your eye. And, um, I was in that class that I fell and I smacked my face on the edge of a bench. Um, and there's a whole, there's a whole summer that I had just a big old black eye for. Um, lots and lots of pictures. Um, and it was another good word for that. It's called a shiner. Um, if you get it as somebody has a shiner, um, it's because you have a big old black eye. So I had some music education there, but not much. But then I changed schools for third grade and on, and music was a pretty large part of education. Not huge, but like it was... Also, not it was probably about the same size as like Spanish for example. We play we learned to play the recorder in School the recorder is like a small Flute like instrument probably just look it up. It's gonna be easier But they're relatively simple to play and to learn but they have a very high skill ceiling right there It's an actual instrument. You can get really good at it. They are hard but like to start with it's not too It's good for kids, right? And we did that relatively often. We learned how to play the recorder, to play some basic songs, a little bit about music, not much. And we also had singing at some point. I remember because our singing teacher was a very strange character. I wonder how he's doing. I bet he's a lot more normal if you're an adult, but as a child, he was a little bit of a strange guy. But, Yeah, we had singing for a bit. We also took, there was some violin at that, near the end of that school, when I like sort of probably like in seventh, sixth or seventh grade or something like that, we had the option to take violin. Only like six or seven of us in the class did it, maybe even fewer because I think it was, I think it was just because a teacher kind of wanted to teach it. it was like an yeah yeah yeah we could do either singing or or choir it was called choir we could do choir or um violin and i decided to take violin and so i learned a little bit about violin i'm very good um i can i can make notes um but it was not like that productive. We definitely learned some things, right? I think that's the, that's a big difference is that we definitely learned some things and had some basics. And like, I remember some stuff from those classes, but definitely we didn't, nobody learned, became a master or anything like that. In high school, it's completely optional, but in my high school, there was choir, there was band, and there was guitar at a certain point. So a lot of kids are in band, but that's kind of like a kind of person you are, is like a band kid. Same with choir. So I had a lot of friends that were in choir or in band, and they often connected with the theater department. So if you, if you're in a pretty big high school, you're going to have lots of these different things, these different activities. Um, there's also like dance team is all dance team, which was pretty cool. There's. Was there any other music stuff? Yeah. But the class I took was guitar. That was a new class in my freshman year, I think my freshman year of high school. They started offering guitar. And it was taught by a local guitar professional. He's a very good guitar player, kind of a pretty funny teacher, because he's not like a traditionally trained teacher or anything like that. And the class was quite popular, a lot of people wanted to play guitar, and so the classes were huge, and we only really learned some basics. I had been learning and playing guitar on my own, so I was already far past what the class taught, but it was still a fun time to go hang out, I had some friends in that class, we would learn some basics, learn some songs, and then we'd get the rest of the class to learn on our own, which was actually pretty cool. So I definitely enjoyed that class even though it wasn't that productive. It was nice to have some time to just kind of play music and hang out. That's all the music like in school that I had, but it's also quite common for kids to take music lessons extracurricularly. Extracurricularly? I think that's right. An extracurricular is basically outside of school. So extra, right? Additional or outside or whatever it is. And then curricular, which comes from the word, the same root as curriculum, which is the, what is going to be taught in a class. So, Oh, excuse me. So on your first day of a class, you might get the curriculum. They might give you a whole list of what you're going to learn that year. And this is the curriculum. We're going to cover this, this, this, and this, this. Done. So extracurricular music lessons are like taking piano lessons with a different teacher. And that's what I started doing that from a relatively young age. I don't remember how old I was, but I started taking piano lessons. And it's very common for piano lessons to be done more informally in somebody's home. So I remember I had music lessons with somebody named Jerry. She was a kind of, not super old lady, but she was like a little bit old, little bit cranky piano teacher. And I learned a lot of basics with that. We covered some basics, learned some songs, that kind of thing. Then at a certain point I stopped doing that because I started doing more like soccer and other extracurriculars that weren't music necessarily. I did a little bit on my own. But then also in Portland, where I grew up, there is this really cool music school called Ethos. Ethos Music School, Ethos School of Music, something like that. And it is, I believe it's a non-profit music school for lots of different kinds of people. And it's a really cool kind of school for learning how to play music. And I took some lessons there with guitar, with piano. My parents were very supportive of me trying out instruments, because especially at like Ethos, you can rent Instruments or they have them available there that kind of thing. I also did the rock band program not very long. That's where you they put you in a group of a couple of other students and you sort of form a little band with the help of a teacher. A very cool program. It ended up not being for me. I tried it a couple of times even when I was older and it really never worked for me. Not really a band person. But then the actual, my favorite music teacher that we found was this guy named Sean that my, I don't remember how my parents found him, but he was this sort of like hippie-esque, vagrant kind of guy. Very talented musician, incredibly talented musician. He can play every single instrument. His music is in his entire life. He basically spends no money, lives as cheaply as possible, and would just goes and travels and plays music as much as he can. And this, this teaching that he did is all he would do, he wouldn't take money for it. What he would do is he would come into the, to our home and we'd, and we'd have dinner together. That was the payment. I think, I think maybe a little bit of money. I don't, but I, I'm pretty sure it wasn't much at all. But he just wanted to like be there, have dinner, hang out with the family. Right. And usually like a, when you have like a nice full home cooked meal, right. That is worth something. And then he would play music with us. And so I would, and we get to do whatever we wanted. We'd play around, he'd bring in some fun instruments or we'd play with the instruments that we had there. And it was a lot more exploratory about what we wanted to learn. And it was a really, really cool experience because he's also genuinely just a very good person, very interesting. He invited us to his music shows, all sorts of things. So that was really cool to have available as a young person, musician, whatever you want to say. And that's actually also the skill that I still have from those lessons is there is a Monty Python skit called Gibberish. And it's where they speak and they just say absolute gibberish, but they make it sound kind of like they're having a conversation. And he knew that whole sketch. And so for a while, I was like, I wanna learn that sketch. And so instead of learning music, we started learning that, the skit. And I still have like the beginning memorized. It's like, it's burned into my memory. And what happens is there's two guys on stage and it's like they're having an interview, but they're just saying random words. But they have the whole, the joke is that it's like, ham sandwich, bucket of water, plastic Duralex, Robert McFisher's underwear. Scrubbed Rapid Emulsions, Zinc Custard Without Sustenance, Geriatric Scenery, Maximizes Prestige-Leading Government-Declining Sapphire Clubs, Incidentally. But tonight, Sam-Pam-Bombay-Bermuda, In-Dip-Theory-Rustic-Macao-Pine-Splendor. They're also speaking in a British accent, so it sounds even funnier. Rapid and Fud-Fud-Fooey-Jugs-Rapid-The-Big-Bar-Roulanas-Musk-Green-Gages-Mix-Straight-With-Nipples-and-Tip-Toe-Rustic-Machinery-Rustically-Inclined. Good evening and welcome. Great sketch, look it up, very funny. And then it goes, hello, saddlebag, saddlebag. Just great comedy, I would say. Very funny. I probably should keep learning that. I still have some of it in there, but it's definitely harder than it was. I used to be better at it with more accurate pronunciation and diction. But anyways. So that is my roundup of music lessons. I think that they're, I'm very grateful that I had music lessons growing up and I will certainly be having my children take music lessons and being more exploratory with it. Even though I'm not a musician, I think that it's very important to have those, that sort of experience and to learn about music and to learn to play things because it is a almost universal form of art as we are as people. And I think I mentioned this in my recent episode talking about music, but I sort of miss that I don't play much music anymore. And because mostly because I don't have good instruments here, when I have instruments available that I like to play, I play them. The only musical instrument I have in my apartment is my harmonica, but I don't really play the harmonica. Um, it's hard, but also cool. It's just not my instrument. I don't know. It's ever so often I'll break it out and play something, but yeah. However, I did ask my parents to bring something. They're coming to visit me next week. Um, and so I asked them to bring one of the ukuleles that we have in the house. We have this really cool eight-string ukulele. So a ukulele typically has four strings, but this one has eight, so it's doubled up. There's two for each note, and it sounds a lot fuller, richer. It's actually a really nice instrument. And they don't play music. And so I was like, Hey, can I have it? I would love to have something to play. If I could have a guitar here, I'd probably want to play that more. But like I said, in the piano episode, the piano is my favorite. And I would really like to get some kind of keyboard or something to play on, um, to have, I don't know. I really like pianos and that, that experience of playing the piano. So. Yeah, anyways, this has become a long episode of me rambling about music and music lessons, but the last thing I want to say is that if you are an adult, if you've never played an instrument before, you can still learn. It's not too late. You can still have fun with it. You don't have to be professional. It's a lot like going to the park to play soccer with your friends or to shoot some hoops at the basketball court. You don't have to be a professional to enjoy this kind of thing. You don't have to be a professional volleyball player to enjoy playing volleyball on the beach or a professional writer to enjoy writing little things or poems or whatever it is. And so, yes, it's hard as a beginner because you want to be better. But if you put some time into it and you actually genuinely want to learn, you can learn to do things and to be happy with your progress. Just put time into it, right? That's the big thing for music and playing music. A lot of it is muscle memory, which does come down to practice and time. And so try to find a couple things that you enjoy doing, practice doing them, and you will get better over time. It just takes patience, that dedication, and also there's a bit of flow. Don't try to be too rigid with it and really try to enjoy it because playing music is really cool. And even if you're way worse than all of the music you ever listened to, that's still cool. I don't know. But anyways, that's all I got for today. Thank you so much for listening. I hope that you enjoyed this episode. Maybe learn a little something about culture in the US and whatnot. If you took music lessons, I'd love to hear how that went down in the comments below. I'll see you tomorrow. Bye.
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