Thought Socks

I generally wouldn’t call myself a particularly proficient player of the piano - my lessons lasted for a month before I argued with my teacher and decided to stop (This was after an entire lesson was spent adjusting my posture. I have no doubt it’s important for those want to take classical piano seriously, but I wanted to take it entirely unseriously!). I still play for probably 30 minutes every week, but I just twiddle around. It’s purely for fun - nothing set, nothing formal.

Although I guess I would call myself a proficient musician theoretically and practically (On the guitar at least), I can’t read music, and I very much need to learn. So when I found myself volunteering to accompany some friends on the piano at a concert my music class is holding, I new it would be a real challenge.

Later at home, I had a crack at the piece. Impossible. My notation reading skills were simply too dire. It would have taken me hours. Fortunately, the modern web presents me with a practical solution: How-to videos.

How-to videos are great. The concept has obviously been around since TV became popular, then it moved on to new mediums like VHS, then the web. What makes now such a brilliant, convenient, lucrative and expansive time for how-to’s is YouTube, and alternative sites like Blip.tv and Veoh.

Convenient

YouTube is right there, at the click of a button.

Lucrative

YouTube is of course free.

Expansive

The most important point. With millions of users, the amount a variety of content is vast, and, at least in terms of how helpful it can be, I’m not sure people realise this.

Searching ‘how to’ digs up 2,320,000 results. On the first page of results alone you can learn how to moonwalk, how to make hot ice, how to make a burning laser, how to solve a Rubik’s cube, how to hack into a vending machine, how to paint the Mona Lisa in paint … the list goes on (For another 100,000 pages!).

I searched YouTube with my problem, and surprisingly around 5 different how-to’s came up. I watched the first one, and within ten minutes I had the gist of the entire piece. Incredible.

As aforementioned, I don’t think many people appreciate the usefulness of YouTube in this respect. There majority of instructional videos on YouTube may be music based, but there is something for everything, and everyone: How To Give Ayurvedic Massage, How To Eat A Jaffa Cake, How To Greet …

WWW: World’s Wonderful Web

This is just one example of the greatness of this interconnectedness the web gives us all. How exciting it is, and reassuring I suppose, to know that someone out there will know, and that you can ask, and that you may not even need to as someone’s got there first!

The subject of countless discussions it might be, but the internet giving ‘everyone a voice and everyone a connection’ enhances the learning and knowledge of it’s every user.