StankbellyPie

I found this forum because I was searching for deeper info than YouTube videos alone can provide on how to play "Foreplay," by Boston. That landed me on this thread. I got my first Casio keyboard for Christmas in 1982, when I had just turned 13. I used it mainly for hiding in unoccupied desks at school and allowing the annoying auto-song to play at a volume just audible to the teacher. (I was 13.) By the time I was a senior in high school I had a larger Casio of some sort and by the time I got to college I was messing around with it just enough to be able to play some chords from 80s songs by ear. Then I took music theory as a sophomore, which was and remains extraordinarily helpful, even if I didn't put it to dedicated use. I also had a drum machine and sequencer, which were stolen off the porch during moving day before I could really learn how to use them. But I was lazy about things I could not immediately master anyway. But always tied to the idea of exploring more. For most of my 20s and 30s I did other things I always seemed to have some hacker unit sitting around, as $250 would buy me increasingly cool keyboards. Finally, in 2016, I quit drinking and found I had more money, a better memory, and a distinct need for an outlet besides distance running to occupy my dead-space mental moments. I already had a Casio electric piano I had gotten as a present, and then decided to commit to a Kurzweil PC3 that was going for $800 on Craigslist. The guy who sold it to me was a serious musician and someone all of you would love, even though you can't trust a damn word of what I say yet. Anyway, I've started pushing though the tough spots and found that not only has my own musicianship increased, but I have a greater appreciation and understanding of music composition overall. It's just an amazingly rewarding use of time to fool around fori a couple of hours and achieve competence in something new, and honor the original artist. I can't normally play at loud volume, so my whole setup is basically the PC3, whatever laptop I am using to play whatever I'm learning, and a speaker monitor handling the output of both. All of these items have decals from various local marijuana dispensaries on them; I usually add one more when I feel I have taken a genuine step up in skill. I'm from New England and now live in Colorado. I occasionally get paid to generate or manipulate words and phrases. That should be enough for now!

Yeah, a lot of the time I reach a certain frustration level, it coincides with a similar finger-fatigue level. However, learning this song along has led me to be a much more efficient fingerer, a phrase I never thought I would publicly release. I like to imagine someone trying to play this on a slide trombone, probably a Simpsons character. Or sometimes I'll play it in a slide guitar patch and tear up over Eddie Van Halen.

So I found this thread (and more generally, the forum itself) last night, about six months after first unearthing the same videos people here have over a period of some 11+ years now. This is great stuff. So painstaking, this process. I was a very young kid when "Foreplay/Long Time" came out, but the entire Boston album is completely unforgettable to anyone with taste. Before I decided at random to attack...er, master this song, I had never attempted anything close to its level of difficulty. I picked up serious playing in adulthood, and :really serious" playing during the pandemic. I have a Kurzweil PC361 that does everything I need it to do to hack through mostly '70s and '80s songs. My music theory knowledge itself far from comprehensive, greatly outstrips my playing ability. It took me a day or more just to master the signature 6-note repeating sequence at the beginning. Now, I can play what I call a passable full-speed version -- no mistakes noticeable to my dumbass friends -- about 1/3 of the time. If I played with a band making other noises to complement my own, I could get away with incorporating a veritable wealth of miscues But that of course is antithetical to the entire point. It will take me another few months to conquer the last 5% of the song, almost as long as it took to get to maybe 50% and again to 95%. It's always lonely at the top of anything. What fundamentally drives me is grasping the sheer value of blind persistence. When I started running cross-country in 9th grade, I was average, but aspired in that weird environment to be the best--not in the world but in my smallish state. The path toward getting there--and I did get close--is a lot like this one. I can make up for a lack of talent or youth or whatever with garden-variety persistence....and a love, a real appreciating for every tangible step forward I can carry my musicianship. For me the biggest sticking point is the measure right before the walkdown done twice (the triplets corresponding to G-flat, D-flat, E-flat and F). Why? Because I don't like to practice! I could erase this deficit in a day, I bet. Maybe I will try today. I also get this weird tendency to freeze in the last measure of the introduction, where you're holding the B-flat and walking the rest down. When my left 4th finger hits the C, my right hand really, really wants to bungle the six-note segment. I'll get over it. For those with a chemistry background, to me, learning this is more like synthesizing a polymer from a limited set of monomers. I like that I can practice one part of the song in ways that helps the rest, which is not always the case. Anyway, just appreciating the thread.