(Re-)Learning to Play the Recorder

This is my very first blog entry. I'm not 100% sure yet what belongs here, but I guess that is something that will come with practice. Anyway, a little context about me: I am a Swiss computational linguistics student in my first year. The subject matter at the university is very exciting, but it's also very head-heavy, so I decided that it's time to make music again to have a balance next to this mental work.

Being a Beginner again

Here I have to say that I neglected to play music for about twelve years. In primary school, I was a solid soprano recorder player for my age, but that was a long time ago and I forgot a lot of things, to be honest. That's why it was a new beginning for me when I started playing the recorder again a few days ago. Unfortunately, I have somehow lost my old (and very high quality) soprano recorder over the years or even disposed of it during a cleanup. In short: I have no idea where it is. That's why I had to buy new instruments.

Of course, I also wanted to have a certain challenge and that's why I acquired several instruments at once, namely a soprano recorder, a tenor recorder and a tin whistle. Fortunately, the soprano and tenor recorder have the same handles, which makes life a little easier for me. However, with the tenor recorder, the sheer size of the instrument is a challenge, and at the moment I'm still working on hitting the low notes straight away. But I am sure that with time I will get to grips with this too. 

The Instruments

 My instruments are all beginner's instruments and this is certainly a good thing for the moment, especially as I am only learning them for myself and without a teacher or lessons.

 My Tin Whistle is the Clarke Pennywhistle in D: 

 My soprano recorder is the Yamaha YRS-32 B: 

 And at last my tenor recorder is the Yamaha YRT-304 B II:

Why you might want to follow this blog in the future

• Sharing my rediscovered joy in these instruments with me
• Follow my progress (hopefully)
• I will also upload lesser known music and folksongs to DTube
• I will share some interesting background information about the music here

Do not expect perfectly played music, I am a beginner, and this will not change in the near future ;)