No Fingertip Sensation

Originally, when I started this blog, I wanted to revolve around the universal theme of making entries about personal lists. As with my first two posts, I have kept true to this idea. It's quite apparent, however, that I have a very strong passion for music, travel, technological evolution and, most importantly, experience.

Today I would like to write about my experience over the past week of re-learning to play the guitar, how technological evolution has helped make me better at it and why this compliments my love for music today.

I started playing the guitar when I was about 11. I had two guitars passed down to me by my Mom and Dad. The first few songs I ever learned were Scarborough Fair by Simon and Garfunkel and Landslide by Fleetwood Mac. Thank you Mom for teaching me these songs, folk rock will always have a special place in my heart because of this. Mind you, in those days despite my hands being too short for bar chords, these two songs I learned were plucked* and not strummed.

I continued playing guitar well until high school. Many afternoons were spent locked in my room singing my soul out to Guns N Roses, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Pearl Jam, The Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots until my fingertips were hard and calloused. Although we had internet pretty early in my house, the world wide web did not have a lot of reference to guitar how-tos and tabs for those who were trying to learn. So most of the time I learned new songs through a) other friends b) listening to the track over and over 'til I got it or something close to it c) guitar and music magazines and finally....wait for it...d) the dreaded, probably 60% erroneous, song hits! Eventually my interest faded as I got distracted by other interests like climbing mountains, writing, art, watching plays, and scouting for the best thrift finds. Music-wise, I instead settled for discovering new artists, watching live bands and, at some point, even became a band aid (you know, the free spirits who aid to inspire the music for the musician).

Over the past week, however, I decided to pick up the guitar again and try to learn how to play new songs. I started with something easy: Fleet Foxes' Tiger Mountain Peasant Song. The chords were pretty straight-forward and learning how to play it did not pose as much a challenge as memorizing the lyrics so I could sing along while playing. But over the weekend I decided to be intrepid and try something that offered a bit of a challenge. I decide on Street Spirit by Radiohead. It's short song, I'm extremely familiar with it, plus it involves plucking, so I decided it should be a perfect challenge. Boy, did I not walk in the park with this one. More than once during the course of learning this song did I want to throw my guitar and smash it against the wall!

Earlier this month I made a list of a few things I wouldn't mind taking up which included: a racket sport, basic cooking classes, art classes (specifically sculpting), and music lessons. The great thing about today's accessibility to almost anything because of the internet is that you can rid yourself of paying for the lessons part because almost everything can be learned via the world wide web. In my case, guitar lessons were learned through youtube. Thank you weird, oily haired French dude who uploaded the tutorial video of the song. It took a lot of practice, but I am rockin this one now!

Although I would like to learn newer songs, I am starting with the ones that I always wanted to learn how to play but never got to because (a) the tuning of the guitar was not the E standard and I didn't know any other way to tune a guitar, (b) too complicated to listen to and try to figure out by yourself, or (c) no chords or tabs can be found. These obsticles today are easily solved by (a) the awesome iTunes Chromatic Tuner downloadable totally free at apple.com (b) again, youtube.com tutorials ROCK, and (c) almost any tab for any song can be found online, there are loads of websites that are solely dedicated to archiving guitar tablature.

So this week I plan to learn (a) Rain Song by Led Zeppelin since I can finally tune the guitar to anything I want, (b) Mouth Full of Cavities by Blind Melon because youtube offers great tutorials and (c) Last Goodbye by Jeff Buckley for the same reasons as a&b.

I don't know how long this yearning to learn how to play songs on the guitar will last. But, if anything, the experience of testing your patience, keeping the discipline to continue practicing, developing your muscle memory and having the sense of achievement when you finally perfect what you've been working on is good enough for me. You never know, I may evolve into making my own music and writing my own songs...

One thing's for sure, though: I will never post any videos of myself playing the guitar or any other sort online.

*Guitar plucking or finger picking is a method of playing the guitar where you use your thumb and fingers to pick or pluck notes and creates a more melodous sound.