For the past five years, I’d been thinking of doing a bit of music more seriously.
I’ve never been good at music. And no matter how many lessons I was forced to take, I never did well in it like my sisters did.
Both my elder sisters have perfect pitch and they caught on the whole logic of how chords work and so on. I struggled at every step.
But for several years now, it seems that it’s such a waste I don’t play more music. After all, it’s a privilege to have learnt it. I am trying to convince myself that no matter how bad I am, I should try to work on it. At the very least, while I’m not musically inclined, I’m at least not tone deaf.
I’ve been to a few violin shops to get another violin because having a whiny violin that’s poorly made is hard to play and doesn’t inspire you. While it’s true that any good musician can sound good on any violin, even the worst, a mediocre violinist can use all the help he/she can get on an above average violin.
A mid range violin with good tone is inspiring because when you hear the fabulous sound you can coax out of it, you concentrate on perfecting not just the tune of the note, but the tone of it. But the violin I like comes from the US and costs a cool $7500. Too much for me to get started again.
I could go back to the bunch of harmonicas I got. I wanted so badly to play something that I got Country and Blues Harmonica for the Musically Hopeless. Midway through the book, I was doing so well, I mail ordered a whole bunch of harmonicas from the US and got Jerry Portnoy’s Blues Harmonica Masterclass. But I never made it past the first disc. Now and then, I do play the harmonica, but I don’t seem to have a good melody in me to take it further.
Recently, I purchased A Modern Method for Guitar. I’ve played the guitar in school before. But just learning tabs and not really learning it well at all. But since we have a guitar in the house, it was something I could pick up. And there are so many tutorials on the Internet available for free that there’s no reason why I couldn’t pick it up again and cheaply too.
Those who have been to my house know that I’ve got a piano too. So why didn’t I go back to that, since that was the first instrument I picked up? The thing about the guitar is that it’s portable. So while waiting for the script to work, it’s convenient to have a guitar to pluck while thinking about things. And you can always have the guitar near to you, on the bed, on the floor. Not so with the piano.
So, after plucking a few strings for the past month or so. And trying to practice a bit here and there. Learning from my book and also getting tips from the Internet, I present here, my first recording of a little something, that I woke up with a few notes in my head and thought, I think I can play this thing!
Here’s my first published Samson Zoom H2 recording on the Spanish Alhambra 5P. And I’m surprised at how good I sound. It’s all the guitar, really. It’s very sweet.
[audio:https://joanneteo.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/20081002.mp3]Okay, I’m light years from being Chet Atkins. Still successful baby steps are very encouraging. And being able to record on the H2 so conveniently and have immediate feedback to the way I sound to others is just fantastic.
good job! Keep at it!