This was one of those weekends. It was a bunch of nothing, and yet it was full. Saturday afternoon, there wasn’t one, but two birthday parties to go to. The first both Ian and Miranda were invited to Ilia’s 10th birthday. Ilia is the boy who Tammy was tutoring through last summer. He is in a new school now, and is doing very well.
The birthday was at the bowling alley (5 pin) at SAIT, the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. Go figure that they would host kids’ birthday parties. The bowling alley that we went to with Sepideh and Ilia last year has closed down, apparently.
It was a typical kids’ birthday party: lots of noise, kids getting hurt, the catering food didn’t arrive… the usual chaos. I was the only dad in attendance, and Tammy was there, so I didn’t feel too guilty about going upstairs, and watching an intramural hockey game going on at the ice rink. 🙂
After the party, Tammy and Ian took the train home, while Miranda and I drove out to High River. Miranda’s friend Sierra, who attended Miranda’s party last weekend and we went to Calaway Park with, was having her birthday party. Her mom and dad are divorced, so while she lives much of the time just across the highway from us, her “other home” is a good hour’s drive southeast. So that was a long way for a party and sleepover, but she had fun.
This morning, Tammy drove out to get her, and that left Ian and I to our own devices. And that was fun for us. It was a mix of playing a racing game on the Xbox, and playing music together. The racing game was Cars 2, which I picked up just after Christmas when I found it in the bargain section at Superstore. It’s a pretty good racing game, and of course Ian loves the characters and all of the locales from the movie.
But the other thing was playing music. Both Ian and Miranda are doing very well at piano this year. Miranda is just sort of… excelling. She isn’t trying hard, but managing to outstrip her classmates, according to the teacher. Ian has been practicing a lot, and having fun at it. He also took a liking to the music on an album that I bought off of iTunes over the break: The Man Machine by Kraftwerk. It is a classic album: early synthesizer-based music. The song “The Model” is a fairly well-known hit off it.
So what I did was I hooked up the Roland XP-10 synthesizer’s output into the digital piano. When I turned them both on, the sounds of the synth came through the piano’s speakers. So I sat in a chair next to Ian at the piano and we could both play at the same time. We started working out the parts and chord changes to The Model. We practiced for a couple of hours, and while it wasn’t exactly polished by the time Tammy got home, she could see that we had tried.
One cool thing that happened while we were finishing our practice was he wanted to try to play against the cover of The Model that the East German metal group Rammstein did of it. I happened to have played the guitar part before, and I warned Ian that Das Modell (it’s in German) was de-tuned one step, from Em to Dm. He didn’t get what I was saying, but we played the song and I showed him how we had to change the notes to lower ones to match the song.
Now, remember that Ian has perfect pitch. He hears the notes as distinctly different. It took him a couple of minutes to understand how the song was transposed downwards and how that related to the keyboard. Then he totally got it. He started playing the song parts in Dm, which was considerably harder. So I showed him the “Transpose” feature on the Yamaha digital piano. It allows the piano to be tuned upwards or downwards as much as a full octave, so if you transpose -1, playing a C key gets you a B note. I showed him that, and then played “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in C, but with a transpose of -3. He saw what I was doing, and heard the “wrong” notes, and started busting a gut laughing. He thought that was the funniest thing in the world.
It was the strongest reinforcement of how differently Ian hears music. Sometimes I wonder how it does sound to him.
