A few months ago, we were having a nice dinner with a few friends at a nice Mexican restaurant, celebrating Brians birthday. It was a fun family dinner with the other family. Everyone was there, except our oldest 15 year old daughter, who had a prior commitment. We were taken quite by surprise, when they mentioned how much they had enjoyed our daughters piano performance they had viewed on YouTube. At least they were pretty sure it was our daughter, as how you could see where the hands and the piano keys in the video. She was playing a song that was rumored to be used in the upcoming Twilight movie by some Japanese performer. I forget the actual title right now, but that’s kind of irrelevant.
Needless to say, both my wife and I were pretty surprised, as we didn’t know that my daughter even had a YouTube account, let alone was posting videos of herself. Now this was kind of good and bad. First of all, my wife was pretty apprehensive as she’s a bit paranoid when it comes to the internet, especially concerning her children. Me not as much. But the good thing seemed to be that she was taking an interest in playing piano again, which in my mind is always a good thing. Anyway, we went home and checked it out. Found it on YouTube, and gave it a listen. It was really quite good. We were both impressed, and so did many of the commenters who had listened to the video. It had already been viewed like 30,00+ times. Makes a dad proud doesn’t it?
Anyway, we talked to her about it, and she was even more surprised that we found out about it, then we were when told about it by friends. Apparently, she had found some free sheet music online, and taught it to herself. Then she proceeded to record it, and post it online. It was pretty cool I thought. Nice to see her playing piano again as well. I even tried to get her to learn some Radio Head sheet music I also found online. That didn’t seem to interest her as much, so I left her to find her own stuff she liked playing. I think eventually she took the video down, as I kept showing it to so many friends and family, she was getting embarrassed by all the attention. In the end though, I thought it was nice to see how the internet can be a valuable resource for kids.