I’ve formed a band with some of my friends – none of us are particularly good at playing anything, but we’re keen and want to have fun. Discussing what songs we should learn to play, we discovered that there is very little overlap in our musical tastes (as mentioned before).

One guy is into progressive rock, and recommended an album to another guy who was interested. The second guy came back a few days later and said, “Wow, that album is great!” The first guy said, “Yes, I call it a masterpiece.” The second guy said, “Yes… I agree. It is a masterpiece.” Then there was some discussion over how does one recognise a “masterpiece”, and could someone who has no prior knowledge in the field recognise a work as a masterpiece? They came up with a hypothetical experiment: Give someone who knows nothing about progressive rock a copy of this album, and another prog rock album, and see if they can pick which one is the masterpiece.

And so a real experiment was born. I know virtually nothing about progressive rock, so I volunteered to be the lab rat. The guys discussed together and selected a second progressive rock album, which is generally acknowledged to be good, but not a masterpiece. They ripped the tracks off both albums, anonymised the files, and gave them to me. I was to listen to them, make notes, and declare which one I thought was the masterpiece.

Album 1, as it was called, had 12 tracks. Album 2 had 5 tracks. That was all I knew about them. I didn’t know the artists, the album names, or the track names. I played both albums through once, and then on a second listen I took notes. Here’s what I thought.

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So last year my friends and I finally got together and had a group practice session for our nascent band. We’ve scheduled a second session in a couple of weeks’ time and we’re learning our parts for our second song (I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) by The Proclaimers).

So at lunch today we were discussing various related things, like what name we should call our band, and what other songs we should stick on our list of easy songs to learn while we’re starting out. And we started to realise that all of our musical tastes have very little overlap. There were three of us there (out of five) with iPhones/iPads chock full of music, and we could not find even one song that all three of us had on our devices.

One of us would call out something like “The Beatles!” and another would go, “Yes, of course!” and the third would go, “I don’t have any Beatles”. And then someone said “R.E.M.” and one would say “Yes!” and the third would say “no”. And so on. Billy Joel. Beethoven. U2. Blur. Muse. Enya. Mozart. Sinatra. Everything we tried, at most two of us had.

And then there were the other two guys in the room, one who is mainly into prog rock, which none of the rest of us are, and the other… well, he listed some of his favourite artists, which included Metallica, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Chopin, Scriabin, and some Polish composer I’ve never heard of. This guy took eclectic, cut the ends off, threw away the middle, and glued the two ends together. Seriously.

So in trying to come up with a list of more songs we could start learning, everything that someone suggested, most of the others had never heard of. We were amazed by the fact that we’ve all been friends for years, yet there seems to be virtually no overlap at all between any of our musical tastes. And we’re trying to form a band.

The good thing is that we bring a huge variety of enormously different music into this project, and we will all be expanding our musical knowledge.

Tonight my drum teacher started teaching me about dynamics. Accented notes, ghost notes, and so on. We spent some time on technique for the various different volume levels, practising to make sure there was an obvious differentiation in loudness when I played the different types of notes. He’s been running me through a program which he’s developing for his second book, and testing out the new material on me to make sure it’s not too advanced for someone at my level. He said this was the stuff he was most worried about, as it’s tricky to learn for the first time.

I did find it a bit tricky, but I think with a week to practise before my next lesson I might manage this material. The shown bars are a groove from James Brown’s Cold Sweat. This is the sort of level I’m at now. I can look at this music and have a good attempt at playing it. Not very well, but it’s not impossible and I can probably master it given a week of practice.

For reasons of busy-ness and the fact that I’ve been learning lots of new drumming stuff at my weekly lessons that I’ve been practising, I haven’t done a play-along of the first song on our band’s initial set list (Brass in Pocket, by the Pretenders) since our first group practice session several weeks ago. I was starting to worry that I might have forgotten how to play it, so I just decided to give it a play through now.

And played it through, two times out of two, at least as well as I’ve ever played it before. Possibly even better – more fluid, better timing. It looks like all this practice I’m doing is actually making me better!

So, I learnt a thing about music last night. I learnt what a major chord is.

This may seem paltry to those of you with any musical training, but it’s something that I genuinely never understood before. I had that moment of insight where it suddenly became clear, and it’s now a piece of knowledge in my head that I never had before.

I’ve known for a long time how to play a C major chord on a piano. Someone showed me that way back when I was a kid. You find C – that’s a white key immediately to the left of a pair of black keys. Then you find E, which is two white keys to the right. Then you find G, which is another two white keys to the right. Play C-E-G simultaneously, and that’s a C major chord.

I’d got it into my head that these “major chord” things therefore involved the same finger pattern on the keyboard. So, for example, if you just shift one white key to the right, you end up on D-F-A. And that should be “D major”. Right?

It turns out that’s wrong!!!

What you really need to do is count all the keys between the notes, the white and the black ones. Going back to C major, the keys are: C, C#, D, D#, E. You need to count 4 keys from C to get to E. (C# is 1, D is 2, D# is 3, E is 4.) And then to go from E to G, you need to go: F is 1 (because there is no E# black key), F# is 2, G is 3. 3 keys.

So a major chord is a note, plus the note 4 keys above it, plus the note 3 keys above that.

So if you start at D, you go: D# is 1, E is 2, F is 3, F# is 4. Then G is 1, G# is 2, A is 3.

Which means that D major is in fact D-F#-A, and not D-F-A as I’d always assumed!

I was genuinely delighted when I realised this. And now, I can actually figure out the correct major chords starting at any note I want! I honestly feel like going to a piano and figuring them all out and playing them. It’s one tiny piece of knowledge and understanding that has opened up a way for me to expand my horizons beyond a rote-learnt single chord, into a larger field of chords that I can just calculate correctly, on-the-spot, any time I need them.

And you know, in hindsight, it actually makes sense. I know that a piano is conventionally tuned so that the tone interval between each successive key – regardless of whether they’re black or white – is equal. So the interval from E to F is the same as the interval from F to F#, called a semitone. So in a major chord the intervals are always 4 semitones, and 3 semitones. I had never made that realisation before.

As I said, this may seem trivial to anyone who knows any music theory, but to me this is a revelation, like a blindfold being lifted from my eyes. I was, and still am, genuinely excited. Music theory has always seemed completely opaque to me. No longer! (I know there’s a lot more to be learnt, but I gotta start somewhere.)

On Saturday, a bunch of friends and I are getting the band back together. The fact that we never had a band before is irrelevant.

We’ve been talking about starting a band for years now. The main problem is that our musical abilities vary widely. AS has been teaching himself classical guitar for some time now. SI plays piano regularly. AS took piano lessons as a kid. DK is good at Guitar Hero. I learnt recorder at school but was never any good at it. So the proposal was that we all adopt instruments that we don’t know how to play, and learn together. I called dibs on drums.

And that was as far as we got for about three or four years. Then in March this year I walked into a music teaching place near where I live on the spur of the moment and booked a drum lesson. I kept up the lessons once a week (with a breaks for my trip in May, and one or two other weeks skipped). My teacher is Paul Watson, a Sydney session drummer who has worked with several bands. He’s been taking me through the drum instruction book he wrote, and at our lesson tonight we finished the last thing in the book. Next week we’ll start on the notes he’s putting together for a more advanced book – beginning with triplets! He says he expects people to take 6 to 12 months to work through the first book, and given I’m an adult who’s never really played a musical instrument before, he’s impressed that I’m at the short end of that band.

Here’s an example of the sort of stuff from the last section of the book that I can now play. This is the groove from John Mayer’s Assassin. I’m not actually familiar with the song, but when I play this it sounds like a beat I know. (For those of you who don’t know drum notation, the Xs are hi-hats, the middles notes are snare drums, and the bottom notes are bass drums.)

I’ve also been learning the basic groove and fills (the fancy bits) of a few easy songs, that we’re going to start playing together in our band on Saturday. While I’ve been learning drums from scratch, AS has been transferring from classical guitar to a lead electric guitar, and DK from Guitar Hero to a bass guitar. SI has claimed piano – which works since we’re going to jam at AS’s place, and he has a piano (his wife plays). AC is going to bring an electronic keyboard and figure out how to do the rhythm guitar pieces on that. We’ve also dobbed DMc in for vocals, but I’m not sure if he’ll be there on Saturday.

Our first set will include Brass in Pocket (The Pretenders), I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) (The Proclaimers), Cloud Factory (The Clouds), and Summon Bigger Fish (our own song, written by Evan Dean!). Plans are to include more difficult songs later as we get better: Starlight (Muse), Vertigo (U2), Run to the Hills (Iron Maiden). I fully expect us to do some filk as well. I think our repertoire is going to be very eclectic.

I’ve been denying it… but it’s finally hit me. I’m old.

A week ago, I had not heard of the band Muse. After being exposed to one of their songs (Knights of Cydonia, for those keeping score), I was impressed and curious. And then one of the guys who is part of the group of friends with whom I am in the beginning steps of forming a band, suggested another Muse song as one we should learn to play (Starlight). Being on the same album as Knights of Cydonia, I grabbed the whole album (Black Holes and Revelations) from iTunes on a whim.

Oh. My. God.

How have I not heard of this band before??

I just grabbed the follow-up album, The Resistance, completely unheard, and am very seriously considering just buying everything they’ve released. And I see they have a new album coming out very soon… and I’m actually excited and full of anticipation.

How did I get into this state? That I can be totally unexposed to one of the biggest bands in the world, a band whose music it turns out I actually really like – once I hear it. I’m not hip and happening any more. I don’t get exposed to new music. I listen to the “oldies” radio station in the car (where “oldies” now seems to be defined as anything earlier than about 1995).

The years are weighing heavily, and I just don’t understand.

So, I’ve been noticing over the past year or so that I can’t sing falsetto any more. And it’s annoying.

I have no training whatsoever in singing. I’ve been told that my singing is poor. But I enjoy singing along to songs anyway. And for a long time I used to be able to hit (or at least spray with scattershot) ridiculously high notes by flipping into falsetto.

Only now I can’t. Whenever I try falsetto I get a creaky, raspy sound like there’s something wrong with my throat. I thought it might be temporary, or caused by a sore throat or something, but it’s been persistent for a long time now.

I did some quick Googling and found a bunch of sites talking about male singers losing their falsetto voice, and apparently it’s not a rare thing. But they were all on singing forums, and people were talking about stuff like “chest voice” and “head register” and “vocal cord flaps” and other things I didn’t really understand. Some places said that it’s common for males to lose falsetto as they become more trained in singing in their normal register, because of some technicality with how the vocal cords are being exercised or something, but I’ve never trained my voice in any way. I’m guessing it might just be a thing that gets people as they get older too.

So annoying.

So, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra welcomes David Robertson as its new Chief Conductor and Artistic Director beginning in 2014 after our current director, Vladimir Ashkenazy, ends his term next year. I’d not heard of Robertson before, but he’s an American and currently directing the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.

I haven’t attended a lot of concerts during the directorship of Ashkenazy and before him Gianluigi Gelmetti, but the wife and I now have subscription tickets to concerts this year and I’m looking forward to renewing my regular concert-going. Before Gelmetti, I became very familiar with Edo de Waart, who held the reins for ten years. But I’ll never forget his predecessor, the inimitable Stuart Challender.

Or the concert I attended many years ago in which the Sydney Opera House concert hall was full of people waiting for a dose of classical music. Our beloved Stuart Challender walked on to the stage, to the front of the orchestra and stepped up on to the conductor’s platform. And someone in the audience yelled out very loudly, “Onya, Stuey!!”

Only in Australia. I’m hoping David Robertson gets to experience the exuberant enthusiasm of Sydney audiences in a similar way during his tenure.