Instruments of Torture

[Raiha]

[COLOR="DarkOrchid"][FONT="Times New Roman"]I'd like to think that my childhood piano playing wasn't detrimental to the mental health of others. After the initial two years of hell I finally began to play tunes recognizable by others and actually enjoyed. But now I'm 22 and I'm not forced to practice by my overbearing parents. I can play whenever I want and whatever I want and I tend to have a pretty good time doing it too.

Besides, they now have my 10 year old brother to dragoon into playing but god help us, it's not the piano. It's the trumpet. And while I know he's a beginner, as in one year of experience only, listening to him play is like listening to AND watching a train slowly crash into a retaining wall.

For half an hour every other day my eardrums are assailed by sounds that I would like to consider as music, but the stuff makes the angels as well as me weep. And not with joy. I'm considering finding some sound canceling headphones. Mildly expensive, but still completely worth it. Do you have siblings that play instruments that drive you insane? Did you ever have to play music that was a horrible experience for all within hearing range?

You poor things.[/FONT][/COLOR]

[Boo]

[size=1]I drive people (including neighbours and people three blocks away from our house) insane with my funky guitar and bass magic.

I wish I was ordered to play an instrument though. Like piano. I want to play piano. Or violin, flute or double bass. Or saxophone. Rathest all of them. :([/size]

[Dagger]

I still recall with terror the dark days when my little sister first started to learn the violin. That said, while there was definitely a lot of suffering involved in trying to do homework or relax or whatever while her violin's screeching echoed from corner to corner of the house, it's quite pleasant to listen to (albeit just as difficult to escape) now that she's good at it.

The greatest benefit, though, is that it made me become much better at tuning out distractions while working. My roommate decided to teach herself the guitar this year, and she played it a [I]lot[/I], but it never bothered me (nor did my close friend's near-constant penny-whistle playing).

~Dagger~

[chibi-master]

My little sister once wanted to play the guitar. She got an acoustic one for Christmas one year...she never has, had nor will ever take guitar lessons. But she tried to play anyway. And she lost the instruction CD. Imagine listening to [I]that[/I]. Yeah, not pretty. Lucky for me, though, she has lost most interest in playing (little brat never sticks with anything!) and doesn't attempt to play every hour of every day! But when she does, I think it may be terrible punishment for my many sins. Yeah, Santa didn't give her that f***in' guitar, the devil did! And Raiha, sound canceling headphones don't work, so don't waste your money. Trust me, I've tried. Actually, the only ones that ever worked for me were my dad's BOSE headsets, and they are not [I]mildly[/I] expensive. ~So just break the instrument and save yourself while you still caaaaan!~

[Claire]

[FONT="Arial"]One night, I was at a friend's party after it had died down, and for some reason some stragglers were just messing around on the piano. They weren't just banging on the keys, they were playing actual songs, but for some reason the sound made me want to throw the piano out the window.

The only constant instrument of torture used against me is my sister's iHome, if you could call it an instrument.

Oh, and for a similar story: the same sister used to be crazy about learning to play violin, but after being ganged up on by both our mother and mean aunt about how difficult and unrewarding it would be, she no longer expresses any desire to do so. And it wasn't really the discouragement that stamped out her fire, it was how vigorously it was forced on her.

We have this running joke now that she'll grow up to be a painter and all she'll do is portraits of broken violins, which she'd mail to our aunt.[/FONT]

[OMNOMNOMALY]

[FONT="Georgia"]I play the trumpet, actually, haha. 6 years, now. I can't imagine how horrible it was for my parents when I practiced and did my best to learn it at home. Those poor poor fools. Not to mention that I decided to change over to trumpet from the flute. I think they thought they lucked out when I picked that as my initial instrument.

I usually never had a problem with song choices - a song is a song and I'm always happy to play, really. I wasn't a big fan of some songs when I wouldn't get the 1st trumpet part, but I'm a little egotistical so that was only because it hurt me a bit =P

The most absolutely torturous part of my musical "career" were scales. If you don't know 'em, they sound ugly. And, just my luck, I never really bothered to learn them. And lady luck further decided not to look in my favour when scale testing became a major part of testing for me in high school. Memorizing orders of sharps and flats sucked enough, but playing them? Good grief. Somehow, I managed to finish with a very decent grade, all things considering.[/FONT]

[Lunar]

[COLOR="Red"]the best way to tortue someone is to scratch a chalkboard, except for the fact that you hurt [I]your[/I] ears. ooh! i know!!! make someone sit through barney. perfect.:animesmi oh, and i play piano. after i master piano, i'll learn the saxaphone and then the guitar.but seriously, the hardest part was hanon and memorizing songs. scales=easy hanon=hard scales were hard only if i had the flats.l[/COLOR]

[Raiha]

[quote name='Anomaly'][FONT="Georgia"]
The most absolutely torturous part of my musical "career" were scales. If you don't know 'em, they sound ugly. And, just my luck, I never really bothered to learn them. And lady luck further decided not to look in my favour when scale testing became a major part of testing for me in high school. Memorizing orders of sharps and flats sucked enough, but playing them? Good grief. Somehow, I managed to finish with a very decent grade, all things considering.[/FONT][/QUOTE]

[COLOR="DarkOrchid"][FONT="Times New Roman"]Scale testing is normal for virtually every instrument on earth besides possibly the drums?

And believe me, I know what scales are supposed to sound like but unfortunately my brother's scales sound like no scales I've ever heard. Even in jazz music. Oh yes, CK? The point is to talk about musical instruments that you've been tortured by as a product of someone else's playing, not fingernails on a chalkboard.[/FONT][/COLOR]

[OMNOMNOMALY]

[quote name='Raiha'][COLOR="DarkOrchid"][FONT="Times New Roman"]Scale testing is normal for virtually every instrument on earth besides possibly the drums?
[/FONT][/COLOR][/QUOTE]

[font=georgia]I wish I would've been instructed on them in jr.high, instead of learning them while flying by the seat of my pants in high school. Life would've been much less painful. We [B]only[/B] did repertoire tests, ever. Should've known better. But I didn't D: [/font]

[eleanor]

[font=trebuchet ms] I'm sure I irritated the hell out of my mom when I was growing up and learning to play the piano and the cello. Beginning string players=most painful to listen to.

But later on when I was in middle school it wasn't my sister's bad violin-playing that made me irritated, it was actually how good she was. She was concertmistress of our nationally recognized high school orchestra, and she played her violin all the freaking time.

She was great at it, but she also happened to be a perfectionist, which lead to us listening to the same three bars of music over, and over, and over. It got annoying after a while.

I was lazy/not that into orchestra and never practiced my cello, lol.[/font]

[SunfallE]

[COLOR="RoyalBlue"][FONT="Lucida Sans Unicode"]When I was growing up, everyone was taking something. Whether it was piano, violin, viola or cello lessons. So we all got tormented by each other as we learned. It was kind of hard to focus on how awful my siblings sounded when I was too busy cringing over how bad my own playing was. It also helped that we had a pretty decent sized house so you could find a corner to escape to where you couldn't really hear them playing.

During college I had a roommate who was taking voice lessons. She wasn't bad, just too damn loud at times.

By far the most fun though has been listening to people practice who know what they are doing. When I was in junior high and high school, we had a next door neighbor who's a concert pianist. It was kind of amusing to hear the sounds of him preparing for an upcoming concert. Just as it was easy enough to tune it out if you wished, all you had to do was close the window to your bedroom. [/FONT][/COLOR]

[Allamorph]

[FONT=Arial]Dang it, Raiha, you went and got my hopes up, and now that I've read the thread I've completely deflated. Shoot. Where am I to discuss the various methods of inflicting pain with a parsnip now?

Although, I prefer a nice scalpel.....

[I]*ahem*[/I]

I was never able to stand the acoustics in my room, so I never really practiced at home during middle or high school, getting all my work done in the band halls instead. Luckily, I'm extremely fast on the uptake, so I still stayed top of the section for the entire time and had regular high scores in the All Mid-State auditions, sliding backwards only when I switched to a much larger horn than I'd been using previously. (Small-bore trombones are nice and all, but you just can't get the same sound on them.....and I'd played one for almost six years.)

So by the time I actually started practicing alone, my sound had matured to the point where I no longer made small children cry, and could approximate (again, acoustics of small enclosed spaces) a performance-worthy sound.

My first younger sister tried instruments, but she is much more visual-artistically inclined, so she and my mother are the only two members of my family who do not play. My second sister plays trumpet?although it's an uphill battle getting her to break the fifty decibel mark?and my youngest sister plays clarinet and wants to switch to alto saxophone.

And for those who wail about torture, go buy a good pair of headphones. :p My mother [I]begs[/I] us to emanate our various and sundry screeches, and she refuses to acknowledge that my room sounds like the inside of a tin can.

So yeah. I don't brook with the whole torture idea. At least, not in [I]that[/I] vein.

[I]*mumbles incoherently about hot needles*[/I][/FONT]

[Sabrina]

[FONT="Tahoma"][QUOTE=Allamorph][FONT=Arial]Dang it, Raiha, you went and got my hopes up, and now that I've read the thread I've completely deflated. Shoot. Where am I to discuss the various methods of inflicting pain with a parsnip now?

Although, I prefer a nice scalpel.....

[I]*ahem*[/I][/FONT][/QUOTE]o_O

Anyway, I was never subjected to siblings practicing different instruments and so forth. We're a pretty non-musical family. We did get subjected to the horrible smells of failed attempts to make new dishes though. All of us tend to enjoy doing a lot of cooking, though now we've all gotten pretty good at it, myself included, so it's no longer torture.

I have gotten to listen to people practice who have been doing it long enough that it's fun to listen to since they are good at what they do. :catgirl:[/FONT]

[Rachmaninoff]

And here I was the one who inflicted the torture on others when I was first learning to play the cello when I was younger. I'm the only one in my family who took music in any form and my older brothers seemed to be convinced that I was trying to destroy their eardrums. Their answer to my needing to practice was to complain to our parents and find new places to hide my cello.

Later on during college, I've had some interesting roommates as well as others living in the same building practicing. I think the one that grated on my nerves the most was a guy who had a talent for being off key. He eventually gave up on learning the violin, but while he was trying, we all cringed whenever he practiced.

I'm pretty sure my practicing now doesn't really bother anyone, unless they dislike listening to cello music. I still try to practice during the morning hours when people are either at class or have left for work though.

[Raiha]

[quote name='Rachmaninoff']And here I was the one who inflicted the torture on others when I was first learning to play the cello when I was younger. I'm the only one in my family who took music in any form and my older brothers seemed to be convinced that I was trying to destroy their eardrums. Their answer to my needing to practice was to complain to our parents and find new places to hide my cello.[/QUOTE]

[COLOR="DarkOrchid"][FONT="Times New Roman"]Oh dear god. How big was your house? As I recall a cello case is roughly the size of a coffin. For a teenager.

See this is why I'm glad I played on a baby grand piano. There's not enough room in any house to easily hide such a device. And on the other hand at least you were playing a cello and not a piccolo.

Good luck hiding that one. Although we have this massive crawl space underneath the garage stairs that might work for an instrument of any size unless it's a double bass or possibly a timpani set.[/FONT][/COLOR]

[Rachmaninoff]

[quote name='Raiha'][COLOR="DarkOrchid"][FONT="Times New Roman"]Oh dear god. How big was your house? As I recall a cello case is roughly the size of a coffin. For a teenager.[/FONT][/COLOR][/QUOTE]Not all that big really and their hiding places were pretty easy to figure out. It was just their way of being brats really. Though one of them did get clever enough to put the case on my bed and then cover it with clean blankets that my mom had washed. >_> That one took me a little while to figure out since they'd never done that one before.

[Aaryanna]

[COLOR="DarkGreen"][FONT="Book Antiqua"]Being what's known as an unexpected child, by the time I grew up enough to even consider playing an instrument, my older brother and sister were gone. My mom tried to get me interested in Piano and Organ since she has played both all her life and gives lessons as well. But other than to learn enough that I can read music it just never interested me, so no one other than my mom has been subjected to my earliest attempts to learn to play.

>_> I do get tormented by some of her students when they come over for lessons. Having a piano that is kept in tune doesn't stop them from making mistakes and hitting the wrong keys. I usually escape outside to read for some of them. In the winter... I'll go over to a friends house if I can. Otherwise, I just tolerate it. [/FONT][/COLOR]