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By Mark Simos
I started making up songs and tunes on the piano, and later the guitar, almost as soon as I could plunk out a chord or two. I wrote my first song on the piano when I was about eight. It had the lyrics:
The sky is blue, the sea is green, which nobody can deny.
Without realizing it, I had used a line from the song “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow”. (In fact, songwriters and composers are always “borrowing” from music they’ve heard, whether they know it or not.)
When I got bored practicing, I would start making up tunes on the piano that sounded a lot like the Bach and other classical pieces I was supposed to be working on. I would try to see how long I could go before my mom would come into the living room and tell me to stop fooling around and practice my lesson. Eventually I got good enough to fool her for quite a while!
I’ve always been happiest when people give me a musical idea and then let me explore it by “noodling around” rather than by telling me exactly what to do to get better. You can learn a lot that way!
