Tell me if you uber-amateur musicians have this experience.
I pick up the old axe (well, it's a cheap Fender acoustic so maybe axe isn't the right word)... maybe pocket knife.
Anyway I pick up the guitar and start playing. The finger, lacking any sort of callouses, feel the burn of the strings. The buzz in the notes is, well, very apparent.
I kick into a song and immediately muff the chord change. Try again, the botch comes a little later. Progress.
Then I go for a little lead riff. Just a major scale, pick around it a bit, see what happens. It's going nowhere. I cring when I slide one fret too low. There's no spontaneity whatsoever.
So, to make myself feel better, I play a few of the old songs. "Roxanne" (that early Police tune) ... a couple of the easy Beatles tunes. Then I try "Hey, Hey, My, My" (the version with the Johnny Rotten lyrics, even though I'm not playing electric). I'm stunned as I can't even pull off the early note sequence.
I stop and look at my hands. Wonder what's going on in there. I want to blame the guitar (like the ballplayer looks at his glove as the ball runs through him). Yeah, that's it ... blame the guitar. It's a piece of junk. No wonder I couldn't play well.
If crappy music is coming out of it... it must be a ... Chitar.
Yes... this is the reason why I can't play the music as I did as a 20-year-old, when I had time on my hands and practiced like a kid with nothing better to do.
It had nothing to do with me -- it was the damn guitar.
And then I looked at my hands again... and smirked. And played some more without judgment. It was fun and then the kids called.
I put it down and figured it would be August before the strings would be plucked again. Sound familiar?
recommend this
email
print
link to this page
Comments: 4
Yep, sounds pretty familiar. My sustained unemployment since August 2007 has given me an opportunity to get my callouses back.
Some of the finger-picking pieces that took years and years to learn are finally coming back. Practice does make a difference.
Then again, the cheap ($165.00) Takamine acoustic has been changing since I bought it a couple of years ago. The neck is bending and the strings are moving higher off the fretboard. It's hard enough to play the ragtime and Celtic pieces and even more difficult when your cheap instrument becomes a moving target.
On the other hand, a good musician can make a shoe box sound good. I saw this recently first hand.
I had the opportunity to play music with one of my guitar heros, Bob Weir. Bob's drummer Jay Lane was there as well, sitting on the floor and playing a cardboard box. It sounded great.
There's a picture of this on my page. You can see Jay's elbow and part of the box in the photo.
Then, when I take a breath.... I begin to realize why I liked playing the guitar in the first place.