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Thanks to a quick Google and
mollsex's icon-making capabilities, I have a guitar icon! I may have to steal some of the others later when I get further along, but for now, this one pretty perfectly sums up how I feel, plonking away at a chromatic scale. Peace and love, baby.
The story of how I came to find myself plonking out scales is a bit odd. My mother played guitar all through my growing-up years, but while she tried a couple of times to teach me, a combination of her oversize guitar being far too big for me to play comfortably and her own lack of musical-teaching skills (sorry, Mum) meant that we never got very far. Occasionally, especially when I started taking voice lessons, I thought that I should give it a go, since it'd be useful for accompanying myself and mean I might actually be able to do something on an open mic night somewhere. But lack of an instrument combined with my usual fear of doing anything that I might actually turn out to be good at (long story) did their work, and I got this far without ever learning. Brian, similarly, has said more than once that he'd like to learn (especially when we played Guitar Hero together some years back), but nothing ever came of it.
Then, just Saturday as we were driving to Tucson and listening to the radio, I said something about how it was a shame we never got around to learning. He kind of went "Yeah..." and that was that. The excuses had already all been made, there wasn't much point in going into it again.
Fast forward through Saturday, which was lovely. Sunday morning we wake up at our friend Adam's place and decide to head to The B Line, a nifty little restaurant on 4th Avenue in Tucson, for breakfast. However, when we arrive at 4th Avenue, we discover that they've got the entire street dug up to put in trolley tracks, so getting across it to the restaurant is proving to be a bit of a trick. Fortunately it's a nice day, so we just wander down the several blocks until we find the end of the construction, cross, and come back along the other side of the street.
Along the way, we notice some of the fencing has clothing hung up on it. We follow the trail until we find a yard sale going on at one of the little houses on a side street, which seems to be inhabited by several cute hippie girls. We poke around a bit, I find a neat pair of wedge sandals that fit well, and then lo and behold there are two guitars right up on the porch - a Fender Stratocaster and an Ibanez six-string acoustic.
The acoustic is slightly dinged, but in fairly decent shape; one of the girls plays it a bit, and it has a really lovely tone. The Strat is dusty, but looks like it hasn't even been played. They're asking $100 each, so we decide to go have breakfast and think about it. Brian Googles the model of the electric, and discovers that they regularly sell for $300-$400 used. (The Ibenez changes hands for around $50 to $80 on eBay, but given the hassle of shipping $100 isn't a bad price.) So we have a chat about the difference between the things we'd kind of like to do and the things we'd really like to do, and the difficulty of learning new skills, and the importance of making an investment in dreams rather than just letting them remain insubstantial.
On the way back, both guitars are there, and the cute hippie girls are happy to take a cheque. So we carry our new guitars to the car and head off to a Guitar Center to get cases and strings and make sure nothing's wrong with them. (Turns out that the Strat may just be a Stratocaster neck on a different body; the guitar guys didn't recognize the body and the knobs had been wired in backwards. But according to them, the neck alone was in great shape and well worth the $100 we paid, so yay. Brian's taken to referring to it as his Frankenfender.) And now I have a guitar, so I'm working on teaching myself to play it.
The weirdest bit? I thought I'd be scared shitless and convincing myself to keep at it would be an uphill battle (much like writing has been), but I'm actually really excited about it. Maybe I've finally managed to divorce the "learning something new now" from the "OMG there will be expectations down the line!" narrative that usually pervades my thinking. Or maybe I just haven't gotten to the uphill-battle part yet. But even though I haven't gotten any farther than plucking out some scales and basic chords, and even though my fingertips hurt like crazy, and even though just holding the damn thing correctly still feels awkward, I'm really enjoying myself.
Maybe it's finally just the right time.
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The story of how I came to find myself plonking out scales is a bit odd. My mother played guitar all through my growing-up years, but while she tried a couple of times to teach me, a combination of her oversize guitar being far too big for me to play comfortably and her own lack of musical-teaching skills (sorry, Mum) meant that we never got very far. Occasionally, especially when I started taking voice lessons, I thought that I should give it a go, since it'd be useful for accompanying myself and mean I might actually be able to do something on an open mic night somewhere. But lack of an instrument combined with my usual fear of doing anything that I might actually turn out to be good at (long story) did their work, and I got this far without ever learning. Brian, similarly, has said more than once that he'd like to learn (especially when we played Guitar Hero together some years back), but nothing ever came of it.
Then, just Saturday as we were driving to Tucson and listening to the radio, I said something about how it was a shame we never got around to learning. He kind of went "Yeah..." and that was that. The excuses had already all been made, there wasn't much point in going into it again.
Fast forward through Saturday, which was lovely. Sunday morning we wake up at our friend Adam's place and decide to head to The B Line, a nifty little restaurant on 4th Avenue in Tucson, for breakfast. However, when we arrive at 4th Avenue, we discover that they've got the entire street dug up to put in trolley tracks, so getting across it to the restaurant is proving to be a bit of a trick. Fortunately it's a nice day, so we just wander down the several blocks until we find the end of the construction, cross, and come back along the other side of the street.
Along the way, we notice some of the fencing has clothing hung up on it. We follow the trail until we find a yard sale going on at one of the little houses on a side street, which seems to be inhabited by several cute hippie girls. We poke around a bit, I find a neat pair of wedge sandals that fit well, and then lo and behold there are two guitars right up on the porch - a Fender Stratocaster and an Ibanez six-string acoustic.
The acoustic is slightly dinged, but in fairly decent shape; one of the girls plays it a bit, and it has a really lovely tone. The Strat is dusty, but looks like it hasn't even been played. They're asking $100 each, so we decide to go have breakfast and think about it. Brian Googles the model of the electric, and discovers that they regularly sell for $300-$400 used. (The Ibenez changes hands for around $50 to $80 on eBay, but given the hassle of shipping $100 isn't a bad price.) So we have a chat about the difference between the things we'd kind of like to do and the things we'd really like to do, and the difficulty of learning new skills, and the importance of making an investment in dreams rather than just letting them remain insubstantial.
On the way back, both guitars are there, and the cute hippie girls are happy to take a cheque. So we carry our new guitars to the car and head off to a Guitar Center to get cases and strings and make sure nothing's wrong with them. (Turns out that the Strat may just be a Stratocaster neck on a different body; the guitar guys didn't recognize the body and the knobs had been wired in backwards. But according to them, the neck alone was in great shape and well worth the $100 we paid, so yay. Brian's taken to referring to it as his Frankenfender.) And now I have a guitar, so I'm working on teaching myself to play it.
The weirdest bit? I thought I'd be scared shitless and convincing myself to keep at it would be an uphill battle (much like writing has been), but I'm actually really excited about it. Maybe I've finally managed to divorce the "learning something new now" from the "OMG there will be expectations down the line!" narrative that usually pervades my thinking. Or maybe I just haven't gotten to the uphill-battle part yet. But even though I haven't gotten any farther than plucking out some scales and basic chords, and even though my fingertips hurt like crazy, and even though just holding the damn thing correctly still feels awkward, I'm really enjoying myself.
Maybe it's finally just the right time.