Hold On To Me - join me for this first learning attempt (not a real piano vocal cover)

Yeah, I don't know why I keep making these early attempts public. I guess I just want to share the long piano-learning journey with someone.

In my mind, this song falls somewhere between rock and contemporary worship, but it also kind of seems to want to go gospel revival. Lauren Daigle manages to express the feelings that so many of us share without even using any names or titles. She seems a very modest rock star, with a voice that I originally mistook for Adelle's. At some level, I don't really want to be the guy who just plays praise music, but this song speaks to me at multiple levels. I'm pretty sure I'd like this song even if I didn't know who she was singing about. In actual fact, that is how I originally discovered Lauren Daigle - I was just driving along punching buttons on the radio when I came across a song that I liked. It was not a Christian station, so I still don't fully understand how it happened, but I'm glad it did.

This is the third in my so-called "journey" series. As before, my goal here was not to demonstrate my expertise (or the lack thereof), but to inspire other would-be musicians to join me in this journey. FWIW, this is way out of my comfort zone, so I hope it will inspire someone else to step outside of theirs. Play something. Practice. Noodle. Make some noise. Record it and put it out there. Hey, back me up here! I want to see some videos that are just as bad as mine. Or worse. Or better. I don't care, I just want someone to join me on the journey.

When I was younger, I was always surrounded by friends, so it wasn't all that hard to talk someone into joining me on all sorts of "journeys". But as a full-grown man, all of the full-grown people in my full-grown universe are all very busy doing all sorts of very important full-grown things. Everyone says something like, "yeah, I'd like to learn piano (or whatever instrument), but I just don't have the time right now". As if any of us is ever likely to suddenly find ourselves with more discretionary time on our hands. 'Way easier to "start a band" if you're a kid.

Well, I don't have the time right now either, so my progress is slow. No one has the will to join me. No one is present to encourage me and push me forward. My piano teacher, Jamin, is fond of saying that if a person is "gifted", that the gift is actually the ability and the will to practice. He believes that skill level is directly related to hours of practice. He also likes to say that we're all on the same path, just at different places along the way.

I'm not sure if all of that is exactly true, but its fair to say that he is a very wise man, also famous for saying, "Explore, mess up, have fun, rock on, friend", so get your feet wet. Make a comment, Better yet, make a video, link it right here, then we can talk about that!

For anyone interested, here's some of the equipment I used for this recording:

Piano: Casio CGP-700
PianoCam: UNV IP Security Camera (I'm a UNV dealer)
Microphone: Primo EM272 Condenser Mic (hanging almost invisibly from the ceiling)
Headphones:Sony MDR-7506 Professional
Digital Audio Mixer: Zoom LiveTrak L-8
Streamer: very faithful iPhone 6
Video Recording Software: Blue Iris 5
Video NLE Software: DaVinci Resolve Studio 18