Alright, so first things first, I want to give a disclaimer. I suck at this shit. Like, I’m garbage at playing this instrument, trash. But, I’ve been interested in playing classical Chinese music for a while, and since I had the opportunity to buy one and take some lessons, I thought now would be a good time to start.
Unfortunately, because my coins are becoming sparser as the days grow long, I couldn’t afford to take private lessons like I would like to. Instead, I am taking group lessons at a community college not far from the University I’m studying at in Taiwan. I never took group lessons before for a musical instrument, and my experience in this damn class is lengthy enough for me to write a separate post, so I’ll leave it just at that.
I queried the internet (and by internet I mean Google and YouTube) to see if there were any other people that had developed an interest in traditional Chinese instruments, and talked about it. On YouTube it’s really easy to find people track their progress and/or lack of progress on popular instruments like the piano and violin, etc. But for ErHu…, not so much. I found a couple of random videos and forums here and there, but, nothing substantive. Most of the videos of ErHu I found are instructional videos for teaching n00bs how to play, or professional performances. While that’s nice and all, for my self-confidence and sanity, I’d personally like to hear somebody who’s also fighting in the trenches trying to learn how to play this shit (it’s not shit, I just don’t know how to express myself without using expletives, fuck you), and see what they practice, how they practice, and how their playing is coming along. I’m pretty sure if I search for these kinds of videos on Chinese sites I could find them. Like shieeeeeeeeet there better be, if you can’t even find that shit in Chinese, it just might not be meant to be. But anyway, since I couldn’t find what I was looking for, I thought it’d be a good idea to create the content I was searching for. For the most part, all of the detailed instructional content related to ErHu is written in or orally explained in Chinese. Since I can speak Chinese and have interest in this kinda thing, I thought maybe it’s possible for me to be a liaison between both sides. I obviously am too shitty to be a teacher or tutor, and even if I do eventually become good, I still don’t want to be. But if there is someone out there who is interested in ErHu like I am, I want this blog to be a resource to help them along their way.
As of now, the goal is to make this blog a journal of my ErHu journey. I want to share what I’m learning in my classes, how I’m practicing, my progression and recession, and all that bullshit. I’ll try to upload weekly videos of my playing, but that might get too reck so we’ll see. I’m going to try and make my blog posts as detailed as possible, while leaving the videos themselves with just basic comments and what not. But yeah, if you made it this far, thanks for your support!
If you liked this post, make sure to check out other posts on my blog.
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