When I set out to learn the piano, I wanted to do it as fast as humanly possible. What better way than to lock myself in a room for seven full days and remove all distractions? For me it was a step out of the 7:00 to 5:00 business busyness to focus on a single task in an experiment of human will and focus.
This event required a great deal of preparation, getting a week off of work, exercising my hand muscles the week before, booking a room, scheduling the piano tuner, and getting help moving my million pound piano. I did everything I could think of to be ready for this event, removing all distractions including phone, TV, and access to the internet.
I now know what’s humanly possible in 7 days.
After all of this, I ended up not feeling a sense of greatness, but a sense of smallness. Honestly I felt selfish, and somewhat disappointed that I didn’t get as far as I expected. I imagine much like the people at the tower of Babel, I thought anything was possible, but it turns out I’m just a regular old man like everyone else.
Resources from the video:
- Micah Schultz obviously did an amazing job with this documentary, and was awesome to work with. He can do anything, but specializes in short films, music videos, and documentaries. If you need a video he comes highly recommended. Find more of his stuff at Graveltooth.com.
- If you are tired of my clunking and want to hear the real Clair de Lune as it’s supposed to be played, go to Piano Society’s Debussy page. It’s not uncommon to cry 😉
- Special thanks to David Huggins piano tuning. http://pianotuningsbydave.com/
- If you’re looking for a vacation spot, AirBNB is the way to go. Brenda and Val hosted the house I stayed in and were super hospitable, so if you’re looking for a sweet relaxing spot in Colorado Springs you should check it out.
- If you’re interested in Spaced Repetition, you can hop over to the Wikipedia page for SR, and be sure to download the computer flashcard program Anki. It’s the software I used to learn 2000+ Kanji in 2 months.
- I would not have gotten as far as I did without Paul Barton’s piano lessons on YouTube. Thanks Paul!
- You can download the full recital on SoundCloud here. We had to edit out a bunch in the video so it wasn’t too boring. Please be gracious of my many mistakes! Thanks also to my good friend Sven Johnson for taking care of recording audio during the recital.
