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Hello, musical goons and goonettes! I come seeking your advice. I'm really interested in music and want to take up an instrument, but because of some weird neurological issues I don't have good proprioception in the left half of my body. Basically, you know that field sobriety test they do where they make you hold your arms out like a scarecrow and then touch your nose one hand at a time? Yeah, I can do it fine with my right hand but if I try it with my left I almost always miss and wind up whacking myself in the face. My left side is still usable -- I can still feel with it and I could definitely hold up an instrument with my left arm -- but it's really hard for me to do anything precise with it or know how much pressure I'm putting down with it. If my hand doesn't have to move once I get it into place, I could probably use it to push a key or something, but anything more complicated than that is going to get hard for me fairly quickly. So, I ask: what sorts of things are out there that might be options for me to play? I can't be the first person with some kind of physical issue to want to play music -- there's got to be something out there, right? But what? I'd be really grateful for any advice or direction you could give me. Thanks!
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| # ? Mar 2, 2013 01:10 |
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| # ? May 23, 2013 23:31 |
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Have you looked into making electronic music at all? With just a laptop and a couple of programs you can make million-selling tracks as evidenced by recent artists like Avicii, Skrillex and Flux Pavilion and you really only need a way of manipulating a mouse to navigate around them so with your one-and-a-bit hand capacity you should do fine. Granted a lot of it is more composing tracks than actually real-time playing, what is your ultimate end goal for this? Are you looking to be a live performer either solo or as part of an ensemble, of to just make music that you can share with people? Instruments like the Kaossilator Pro use a touchpad as the primary interface and can largely be operated one handed and can create a lot of sound very quickly in a live setting. There is also hundreds of music making apps of various quality (ranging from abysmal to staggeringly fantastic) on the iPad so one of those mounted in a stand will let you express yourself musically with only one hand. I have some instrument-playing friends who consider music made solely on a laptop to be cheating but really it still takes a lot of practice and determination to get good results and it is just as satisfying to come up with a great dance track as it is to nail a guitar solo or tricky drum line. Personally as someone who plays both drums and guitar I don't look down at all on people who are exclusively button pushers but cannot play a physical instrument. The end result is fantastic music regardless of how many years, sprains or blisters it took to get there.
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| # ? Mar 2, 2013 01:52 |
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Get a cool guitar and develop a style based around tapping. Left hand would tap some bass notes and the right could do the melody. If you don't like that idea, buy a keytar!
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| # ? Mar 2, 2013 14:23 |
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Django Reinhardt had a messed up left hand and he was absolutely sick as a guitarist. So you can learn Gypsy Jazz a la Django if that interests you. Alternatively, folk style music on an acoustic guitar is pretty simple, there are open chords that require minimal movement and just a few fingers at a time. Open tunings would expand that even more, and you could play with a slide if you wanted because it doesn't have to be totally precise.
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| # ? Mar 2, 2013 14:53 |
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TopherCStone posted:Django Reinhardt had a messed up left hand and he was absolutely sick as a guitarist. So you can learn Gypsy Jazz a la Django if that interests you. Alternatively, folk style music on an acoustic guitar is pretty simple, there are open chords that require minimal movement and just a few fingers at a time. Open tunings would expand that even more, and you could play with a slide if you wanted because it doesn't have to be totally precise. Specifically, Django had 2 usable fingers on his left hand. He had excellent precision with those fingers though so it's kind of a different issue. You might be able to do something with an autoharp or accordion. Also you might be able to play certain members of the brass family that use one hand primarily for support such as the French Horn. Of course, the brass family can be a lot harder to pick up than it seems at first so don't get upset if you can't get the hang of it.
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| # ? Mar 2, 2013 15:57 |
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Baron von Eevl posted:Specifically, Django had 2 usable fingers on his left hand. He had excellent precision with those fingers though so it's kind of a different issue. You might be able to do something with an autoharp or accordion. Also you might be able to play certain members of the brass family that use one hand primarily for support such as the French Horn. Of course, the brass family can be a lot harder to pick up than it seems at first so don't get upset if you can't get the hang of it. Exactly. Playing guitar without any dexterity in your left (fretting) hand would not be possible. Brass instruments are the way to go for someone like you. The trumpet/cornet and trombone are both very versatile instruments that require nothing more than support from your left hand. The learning curve, as Baron von Eevl said, can be pretty steep but it's certainly not insurmountable.
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| # ? Mar 2, 2013 17:43 |
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How about a steel guitar or a dulcimer?
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| # ? Mar 2, 2013 17:52 |
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Trumpet and Mellophone both only use the right hand for pressing buttons. The left hand is used to support the instrument. Trombone also uses only the right hand to slide the....the slide. I'm sure there are other brass options worth exploring as well!
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| # ? Mar 2, 2013 18:10 |
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The tuba is laughably easy to pick up, and you don't have to use your left hand.
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| # ? Mar 2, 2013 18:18 |
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Elephant posted:The tuba is laughably easy to pick up, and you don't have to use your left hand. I dunno man, it's pretty heavy!
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| # ? Mar 2, 2013 18:56 |
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If you have enough control to move your hand up and down the neck of a guitar while keeping your hand in the same shape, you have a fine career ahead of you in the world of punk rock, OP. Power chords aren't super difficult. On the other hand, you may not be able to, you're the best judge of your own mobility.
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| # ? Mar 2, 2013 21:17 |
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I'd take a look at the mountain dulcimer or maybe even a dobro. I'm not sure what your range of motion is but there is an old guy around here that lost most of his fingers in an industrial accident who can work the hell out of a slide.
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| # ? Mar 4, 2013 19:05 |
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You could always try a Theremin, if your into kinda out there instruments, you don't even need to touch it. It has two antennas that detect how far your hands are, you use one hand to control volume and the other to control what note you're playing. The only problem I could see is that I believe that the left hand is the one controls frequency, and probably requires more fine motor control. Though, there is probably a pretty simple work around for that.
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| # ? Mar 6, 2013 15:39 |
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twomoon42 posted:Though, there is probably a pretty simple work around for that. Stand on the other side of it. 
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| # ? Mar 6, 2013 16:49 |
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I think some people here aren't clear on what a proprioceptive problem actually is. I hope the OP corrects me if I'm wrong, but proprioception is basically the "sense" of where your body is in space (independent of touch, and independent of visually gauging where your limbs are). So the theremin would be just about the last thing I would recommend to someone with proprioception problems - it relies heavily on proprioception, so it might be frustrating. For that same reason, I think the trombone might be a bad choice too. But other than that, I second the brass/woodwind recommendations, since many of them require little movement of the left hand in space or the hand is seated around a fixed set of "buttons." Guitar and piano are iffy. Higher-level playing of either requires fine proprioception (as you are asked to make wider jumps more quickly and have to rely on the sense of "where" instead of the sense of touch), but you could conceivably keep your hands in one comfortable position and learn to play a few tunes/chords, then go from there. They're both instruments that it would be pretty easy for you to "test out" though, if you just have someone show you two chords. If you can play those two chords, then you can play ninety-nine chords, in time. So OP if I'm mischaracterizing your problem, let me know. But I'm sure you can find something, and I'm sure whatever you choose will be worth learning.
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| # ? Mar 7, 2013 12:01 |
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Harmonica might be an option, cheap and easy to test in any case.
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| # ? Mar 7, 2013 14:54 |
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Hey! Sorry for starting a thread and vanishing.RandomCheese posted:Have you looked into making electronic music at all? With just a laptop and a couple of programs you can make million-selling tracks as evidenced by recent artists like Avicii, Skrillex and Flux Pavilion and you really only need a way of manipulating a mouse to navigate around them so with your one-and-a-bit hand capacity you should do fine. This is enticing, but I don't even know where I'd begin. There are so many knobs and dials and options and options for the options and that combined with the fact that I know nearly nothing about music theory and composition makes me worry a great deal that I'd be setting myself up for failure. Do you know of any good books or places I could go to start learning about this? saganite posted:Harmonica might be an option, cheap and easy to test in any case. I want to like the harmonica. I know in my head that it's a versatile and reasonably powerful instrument, but I just... I can't. The mere sound of it grates on me like a vuvuzela. I'm so sorry.  Mirth posted:Trumpet and Mellophone both only use the right hand for pressing buttons. The left hand is used to support the instrument. Trombone also uses only the right hand to slide the....the slide. I'm sure there are other brass options worth exploring as well! The trombone is definitely out (the slide's position is really important and I'd have no clue where it was) but other brass stuff probably would work. I'm afraid, a little, to try a brass instrument out just because they look so terribly difficult though. Is the breath control and lip stuff really as bad as they make it out to be? heap posted:I think some people here aren't clear on what a proprioceptive problem actually is. I hope the OP corrects me if I'm wrong, but proprioception is basically the "sense" of where your body is in space (independent of touch, and independent of visually gauging where your limbs are). So the theremin would be just about the last thing I would recommend to someone with proprioception problems - it relies heavily on proprioception, so it might be frustrating. You are 100% correct and definitely get it. And oh, God, the theremin would be utterly impossible. It's a strange thing, this proprioception stuff -- I can still feel most sensations with my left side but aside from knowing, "Hey, my finger's touching something" I can't really tell you where it's at. If I were to try to play guitar, for instance, I'd be able to tell if I was holding a string down correctly over a fret (since you can feel it) but I'd have no idea at all what fret I was on, or even really where my other fingers were in relation to each other if they weren't touching. I can cheat a little and know that my fingers are "apart a little" or "apart a lot" just by how the skin and muscles feel when stretched, but it'd be really tough to get that right on the fly while playing something. I also might find it hard to make chords while holding up the neck of the guitar (there just seem to be a lot of competing processes there), but I'm not sure if that'd be a real problem or not. The truly big problem I'd have with guitar you nailed, though: heap posted:Guitar and piano are iffy. Higher-level playing of either requires fine proprioception (as you are asked to make wider jumps more quickly and have to rely on the sense of "where" instead of the sense of touch), but you could conceivably keep your hands in one comfortable position and learn to play a few tunes/chords, then go from there. They're both instruments that it would be pretty easy for you to "test out" though, if you just have someone show you two chords. If you can play those two chords, then you can play ninety-nine chords, in time. Another issue that would make both of these instruments difficult is that I have no idea how hard I'm pressing down when I'm pressing something. The only way I can get consistent results is to just mash my fingers down as hard as I can, which definitely rules out piano. I'd imagine I could probably figure out the guitar if I had absolutely no other options, but I'd have to invest a lot of energy in overcoming a disability which I'd prefer not to have to do if I can help it. Learning an instrument seems hard enough. I'm really thinking you guys are on to something with the brass and woodwinds, though -- I especially like the way woodwinds sound and think I'd enjoy playing one quite a bit. I'll need to do some research from here and figure out what's available and what I can afford. I go to a local flea market a lot, so I'll keep my eyes peeled. Thank you all so very much for your time and your kind, encouraging words. I'm very grateful.
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| # ? Mar 8, 2013 03:11 |
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Could you do any sort of percussion? I have goofed index fingers and so I went to percussion because guitar and bass and piano seemed impossible for my hands to figure out. If you're playing a cajon or some sort of hand percussion, could you "zero" your frame of reference with your hand on the face of the drum, then pick it up and put it down again? Or would your left hand be completely unreliable in keeping the beat? You could legitimately keep it at the top of the face on a cajon and do OK. I did buy a trumpet and a bugle, and I got the hang of the trumpet fairly quickly, although my wife and dog HATED it. Anything in the three-valve family should be fair game if you've got a fully functional right hand.
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| # ? Mar 11, 2013 02:11 |
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Nth-ing the brass (and woodwind) instruments. There are about a million oddball percussion instruments that could easily be played with one hand. I'd think most of those would be more useful in an orchestral setting, where you may play a triangle on one piece, and a gong on another. I don't know which ones of those (if any) would be versatile enough if you just wanted to play one instrument. I'm sure being a triangle player would get old pretty fast. The only way I could maybe see guitar working, from how you describe your condition, is maybe if you played left-handed and stuck to just strumming chords. You'd really put your pickguard to the test  .Along somewhat similar lines as the harmonica, there's weird poo poo like a jaw harp. I guess there's always the comedy option of drums in a Def Leppard tribute band  .
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| # ? Mar 12, 2013 17:23 |
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To go back to the theremin - I actually think you could make it work pretty easily - just forget about controlling the volume with the antenna and grab a volume pedal instead - that way you could control the whole instrument with just the right side of your body (if I'm understanding your problem correctly).
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| # ? Mar 12, 2013 19:06 |
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TopherCStone posted:Django Reinhardt had a messed up left hand and he was absolutely sick as a guitarist. So you can learn Gypsy Jazz a la Django if that interests you. Alternatively, folk style music on an acoustic guitar is pretty simple, there are open chords that require minimal movement and just a few fingers at a time. Open tunings would expand that even more, and you could play with a slide if you wanted because it doesn't have to be totally precise. Ooh yeah. Slide would be pretty cool OP. I think you should try it out! Slide guitar is not used enough anymore, but it's absolutely sick and often times doesn't even sound like guitar, though you can also use it to sound like guitar if you're into that kind of thing.
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| # ? Mar 12, 2013 21:49 |
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blames pens posted:
I think this suggestion is really worth considering. I don't think it's necessarily harder to learn music theory and composition through electronic music than by playing a "real instrument", and might even make some aspects easier because the application of what you're learning is more direct. You don't have to spend years refining your technique until you can even play your notes reliably in tune and with the tone you want like you would with a brass or woodwind instrument. There's a technical requirement to getting good sounds out of a computer, but it requires very little dexterity. You'll probably want to study theory alongside it, and as you study the theory you'll be able to directly apply it to compositions that sound good, rather than having to wrestle with your technique and choice of instrument. If you do want to do things like see what different scales or chord progressions sound like, or just want more direct control over the sounds you're making, you can use a midi keyboard and certainly get enough functionality of that to play chords and melodies, either for practice purposes or as part of a piece of music, with one hand. You can't overdub on a piano or guitar so you have to play the full chord voicings at once, while in a DAW you can play a bassline and then layer the other notes you want on top of it. You can also tweak the sounds after the fact, so it's much more forgiving of technical limitations in playing. I say all this as a drummer who went to jazz school and sometimes loses jobs to computers. As far as resources go, there's a pretty good electonic music megathread here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/sh...40&pagenumber=1 And a quick google brought up musictheory.net, which looks like it has clear tutorials on basic theory (someone else may have much better resources). No theory book or website or anything will actually teach you how to apply the theory to your own music, that's the composition part. The most important thing to do is to just start doing it - get some software that you think will work for the type of music you want to play (use that megathread as a starting point and google around, there's tons of information out there) and just try to imitate some music that you like. What sort of music do you listen to? There are some types of music that are very difficult to make on a computer (e.g. jazz) but for many you can make truly world class music without any two-handed dexterity whatsoever. Composition is all about knowing what sounds you want made and figuring out how to make something make them, whether that's yourself and your instrument, a group of people and their instruments, or a computer. You don't have to know anything about composing to start composing, and trying to compose is the best way to learn about composing. If you can't figure out what to write, copy something that you like. You'll pretty quickly find things that you need to learn to progress, you'll learn them faster because you know why you're learning them, and you'll start seeing more ways to apply those concepts to your own music. You can practice composing just like you can practice anything else, and that's the only way to get good at it, just like every other instrument. killerllamaman fucked around with this message at Mar 15, 2013 around 19:24 |
| # ? Mar 15, 2013 19:22 |
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Have you considered trying a left handed guitar? If you have all or most of your control on the right hand side, that could possibly work, as that would be your fretting hand. You would then pick or strum with your left hand which certainly requires less dexterity, at least when you are just starting out. Edit: Doh! Already suggested. Angular Landbury fucked around with this message at Mar 16, 2013 around 05:10 |
| # ? Mar 16, 2013 05:08 |
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You should also consider a hurdy gurdy. It's kind of like a violin, but instead of a bow, you crank it, and it sounds cool as gently caress.
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| # ? Mar 16, 2013 11:43 |
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Seconding (thirding? fourthing?) the suggestion to try electronic music + music theory. A electronic music often makes heavy use of monophonic (capable of playing only one note at a time) synthesizers, on which can only one hand can really make use of the keys at a time - you can still do something with your left hand that won't require good proprioception by leaving it in place over a knob or pitch bender and just waggling it back and forth as you play notes with your right hand - a monosynth played this way is exactly what is making that 'lead guitar' on the Miami Vice theme. edit: I should also note that I've been playing synths for years and have never learned to play with both hands at the same time - I can play equally well with either hand, but I've never been able to get the hang of playing two different parts with both hands at the same time - this isn't really a problem with modern DAWs, since I can just record one part at a time, then go back and record the next part over the top if needed. HotCanadianChick fucked around with this message at Mar 16, 2013 around 17:51 |
| # ? Mar 16, 2013 17:47 |
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The synth options are pretty cool, but if you're considering something small/inexpensive/acoustic there are a few small instruments roughly related to the Irish tinwhistle that can be played with just one hand. Usually in English they're called a "tabor pipe" since the reason they were played with one hand is so the other hand can play the drum. The same instrument in a slightly different tuning is the "txistu", a Basque instrument. The best inexpensive source for either of these is the company Susato, who has really good-quality plastic tabor pipes and txistu for around $20+. They also have an even more versatile variant, with four fingerholes rather than three, called a "pentacorder". So if you're into learning a flute-type instrument check out their site: http://www.susato.com/konakart/Tabo.../1_158_-1_31.do Here's a traditional Irish tune played on tabor pipe (with drum): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF0R1kLJe6E Really skilled French guy performing on tabor pipe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HbpWijLnhQ Another folk-music option worth considering is button accordion: there are a number of styles (some Irish styles, some Tex-Mex) that don't really use the button on the left hand at all, so as long as you can generally move your left arm to pump the bellows for air, all the melody is on the right hand.
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| # ? Mar 22, 2013 04:08 |
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Funny how even after the explanation of his problem, people still suggest things like slide guitar. Which is hard enough to do even with properly operating senses.
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| # ? Mar 22, 2013 09:46 |
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| # ? May 23, 2013 23:31 |
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I think the woodwind/brass suggestions are generally good ones. My understanding is that with your procieption issue you still have reasonable digital control? Trying to learn recorder or pennywhistle would be an inexpensive way to see if this kind of instrument control is something you can do well. And as mentioned some instruments (trumpet) only really finger with the right hand. I don't actually play a woodwind or brass instrument (well, aside from incompetent recorder) so I can't speak specifically to their difficulty, but really any instrument can be learned with some diligence. You could also try learning a keyboard instrument one handed, like a melodica, electronic organ, or synthesizer. A lot of pop/rock/etc playing can be done with one hand. One caution is to not cheap out too much on an instrument. You're going to have, initially at least, a harder time physically playing a lot of instruments, and a cheap and poorly maintained instrument won't help with that. If you want a woodwind or brass instrument, you'd probably be best served by going to a reputable music store that specializes in those instruments (buying used from a reputable dealer that does repair work is probably a fine idea). If you want to play an instrument I would argue that writing music on a computer, composing, etc, is really a fundamentally different thing, and that the musical sensitivity from actually being able to execute music, and the experience of performing music, is pretty critical background for composing.
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| # ? Apr 1, 2013 23:01 |
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