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.