Trials and Tribulations of Learning Keyboard

 

Learning the keyboard is an exercise in frustration and fleeting triumph, a cycle of false starts, awkward fingerings, and brief, shining moments of clarity before entropy sets in again. The keys stretch before you like a field of possibilities, each one capable of harmony or dissonance, yet your hands — stiff, rebellious— refuse to cooperate. You tell yourself it’s only a matter of practice, but practice itself becomes a kind of existential quagmire, a purgatorial loop of repetition that sometimes feels closer to punishment than progress.

LCD Soundsystem’s Tribulations captures this experience with uncanny precision, though it speaks of heartbreak rather than hand-cramping scales. “Everybody makes mistakes,” James Murphy wails over pulsing, mechanical beats, a mantra that could well serve as the internal monologue of any fledgling pianist. There’s something almost cruelly apt in its relentless, driving rhythm—much like the metronome ticking away as you struggle to land a chord progression smoothly. The song is about cycles, about being trapped in a loop, about making the same mistakes over and over again but pushing forward nonetheless. What is learning an instrument if not exactly that?

The moment you think you’ve grasped something — an arpeggio, a syncopated groove — it dissolves, leaving you stranded in an uncanny valley. Your left hand betrays your right. Your timing, so steady in isolation, falls apart when you try to integrate it into an actual song. It’s like Murphy’s refrain: “You can shake it off, or you can go blind.” You either push through the failures, the stiffness, the maddeningly slow progress, or you let the instrument gather dust, resigning yourself to the silence of surrender.

And yet, buried beneath the exhaustion, there’s something else — an exhilaration, an almost illicit joy when a chord rings out cleanly, when muscle memory overrides self-doubt, when you stop thinking and simply play. The song Tribulations itself is a paradox — restless but hypnotic, full of lament but undeniably danceable. And so is learning the keyboard. It is an ordeal, yes, but one infused with the potential for transcendence. Keep at it long enough, and the tribulations become something else: a rhythm, a song, a kind of electricity in your hands.