Let’s go back to Junior school (7-11 in the UK). In those days everyone played the recorder in Music lessons, and Music lessons were as compulsory as maths. Our Music teacher was Mrs Poole, and she was the second most-feared teacher in the school (the most-feared was Mrs Toombs). She wasn’t scary, but she was firm. In a class of twenty, she could hear one descant recorder playing the wrong note. She knew what she wanted from the class, and we were under no illusions that anything less would do. The handful of us who showed any kind of ability at all got to play the coveted treble recorder, and the real virtuoso got to play the tenor.
Everyone in the school could sight-read simple decant recorder pieces. It wasn’t even regarded as a thing. It was the minimum ability required not to feel hopeless.
I went one better. I could play a new piece by ear, as long as someone next to me was reading. Either that or I was following their fingering from the corner of my eye. My sight reading declined as a result.
I tried playing guitar in junior school, and have memories of my mother taking me to a house heaven knows where in south-east London with a guitar teacher in it. The only thing I can remember is making a mess of sight-reading Little Brown Jug. That’s it. It didn’t last long.
Then I went to the Big School and that was the end of playing music.
I bought a guitar in, let’s say 1970 because I can’t remember the exact year. This time round, I practiced my scales and learned some cowboy chords (though we didn’t call them that then), but my left hand was not up to barre chords on that instrument, and right-hand finger-picking was… I tried, I really did, but you know when you’re trying something that your body just isn’t equipped to do? I played through the blisters, the hard skin on the fingertips, the disappearance of my finger-prints and their re-appearance again. I went from barely being able to co-ordinate my left hand with the plectrum in my right hand, to being able to rip out strings of notes almost as fast as John McLaughlin on Bitches Brew.
And there I halted. Metro Bulo Bouvo Dodo. Commute, work, drinking, sleep.
I had a steel-string acoustic guitar I played with a plectrum, and I listened mostly to electric guitarists. That doesn’t work very well. I was not playing for an audience, I was not aiming to play Bach, nor was I aiming to learn to play songs. At one time I had a Joni Mitchell songbook, and a Steely Dan one, and I could play those chords (not knowing that such books bear only a passing resemblance to reality), but it never left me feeling smug with satisfaction. Occasionally I played rambling single-string extemporisations which would engage some of my more tangled emotions.
I would play along to tracks I liked - as long as they didn’t change keys too often. Sometimes I’d have good ideas, other times I’d play some routine licks, and occasionally I’d barely be able to find the key. There was no purpose behind this, just entertainment. I was the very model of a home noodler.
Then came the Lockdowns, when you’d think I’d be playing every day. I didn’t. Weeks would go by without me even picking the guitar up.
Which is more or less where I was eighteen months ago.
For some reason I think playing or learning the guitar is going to be my Next Big Project. I will finally learn all the things I should have learned right back in the day. Minor 7 sharp third chords. The Phrygian Armenian scale. How to play “rhythm changes". Passing tones on a III-VI-IX blues shuffle. Getting enough strength in my left hand to play barre chords on the acoustic. Learning to stretch out my fingers to get those chords that spread over five frets - in the first position. Picking up a working familiarity with DAWs and hence composition. All that good stuff.
That music students spend years learning.
As if I have anything else to do with my time.
There’s a BUT isn’t there? You can hear it.
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