As to piano I became unhappy with forgetting past pieces. So I have refreshed Rachmaninoff c sharp prelude, chopin funeral march and reremembering Beethoven's 19th and Gladiolus Rag...and Beethoven's7th 2nd movement. Along with continuing to play the 5 Bach pieces I learned and trying to find time to learn Chopin nocturnes and maintain canon in d, Pathetique 2nd movement. Etc
Along with Really learning the technical details of some synthesizer stuff and having two small children. So not enough time.

Put aside John Field for now and little to no meaningful time spent sight reading.

And I still have friends who want to do stuff together.

My nephew wanted to borrow a few musical instruments. By chance I also gave him my microbrute. Which is a hardware analog synth. I have that and also an ensoniq esq and casio cz 101 but I never really did much with them. I had one piece i did with a hardware synth. I think the ensoniq...? It was good but I lost interest. I did make ten hours with soft synths.

I gave it to him and it stimulated my interest. I wanted to mess around with the microbrute's sequencer. I never hardly had before. It was an impulse buy while I was very sick. One of the first affordable analog synths. But it sounds very dirty, brutish. Not "warm" or "organic". Cold and metalic and just rough. But with the sequencer going fast (and perhaps a good reverb pedal) could still make something nice.

So while he had it for 3 weeks or so I wondered and watched some videos. I have it back now. And I have a much better understanding of how to use it finally. Reverb pedal should arrive today.

But it's really quite limited. Monophonic. Only one LFO. I actually downloaded a couple apps to try to get a second LFO. (It's semi-modular.) But they don't work great. It's so limited I got to thinking about buying another. Maybe even a eurorack.

But as opposed to spending thousands I recall I had all kinds of free soft synths that could do tons and tons of stuff. And analog is mostly kind of harsh anyway it seems.

So time permitting I want to go back to softsynths. I want to use some from way back along with a few new. I want to really learn how to use Crystal, which as hardware would probably be 2 grand at least. I want to improve my understanding of Synth1. Also want to get better at synth drums.

I got away from it because electronic music isn't so great for live performance. But for live the only things that really give harmony plus melody like I want are guitar and keyboards. And I just prefer keyboards. They can look a bit goofy live but that's what I prefer. And you certainly can play a softsynth with a keyboard controller. So what the hell.

I can sit around pleasantly strumming a guitar. And ok that's nice. But I still would like to make Skinny Puppy /Download type music and I would like to be able to make just about any sound using a synth, not clicking through presets.

And I'd like to make decent drums. It's something I failed at previously. I don't like to give up.