When I’m having a bad day, I pick up my guitar.
- Michelle Branch
When I was growing up, there were two things that were unpopular in my house. One was me, and the other was my guitar.
- Bruce Springsteen
Today marks three years since I began taking guitar lessons. In the beginning, my guitar was mysterious, intimidating, and seemingly beyond my capacity to comprehend. The mystery remains, because I know now that the more skills and techniques I learn, the more there is that remains to be mastered. I understand enough now to no longer be intimidated by my guitar. I’ve learned enough that my skill level has increased to the point where I can play a serviceable rhythm guitar. Within the next few months, I hope to extend that knowledge to being able to play some lead. What I’m going to do with my burgeoning skill is difficult to say, but I’ve dreamed of learning to play the guitar since I was in high school. Now that I’m well down that road, it appears that which was once merely a dream has morphed into an obsession.
When I left to go to college, I “borrowed” my younger brother’s guitar, a low-end Yamaha acoustic. Through the years, I always intended to take lessons. My intentions were good, but it just never happened. The guitar moved all over the country with me while rarely leaving its case. When I left Texas to move back to Portland in 2007, I accidentally left it behind. It was like losing a member of the family, but I eventually moved on. Three years ago, I learned my next door neighbor’s a professional musician who also teaches the guitar. The rest is history, and my current level I owe largely to Ian and my willingness to commit to making time to practice.
My current guitar, a mid-range Yamaha acoustic/electric, has become almost an extension of myself. When I need some time to reflect or unwind, my guitar is both therapist and friend. It’s opened my mind to things I never imagined I’d come to understand, and as I continue to improve I’m beginning to understand that I can call myself a “musician.” For many years (in a tale of an epic lack of self-awareness), most of my life in fact, I’d never seen myself as an artistic/creative personality (says the writer). Now that I’ve recognized and embraced that part of myself, I feel as if my ability to be true to myself has increased exponentially.
One of the truly amazing things about learning to play and understand the guitar, is that I’ve come to hear music differently. I’ve always loved music, but I listened to it as a whole, as if one instrument was producing it. Now I listen to music and pick out the components parts, particularly the rhythm and lead guitars. In many cases, I find myself listening to the rhythm guitar track with the realization that I could play it. Sure, it would take practicing the chord progression to get it down (turns out there’s far more to learning a song than I’d realized), but knowing that I possess the skills to do it is an amazing feeling.
I find myself having recurring fantasies of performing on stage. There are some attendant issues with that, of course, the first being that I haven’t sung for anything that wasn’t a shower curtain or a windshield since 4th grade. I’m incredibly self-conscious about my voice, and I don’t yet know how to let go of that enough to trust my voice. I may have sung in a choir when I was 9, but this is far different…and far more intimidating. One of my goals is to find a way to let go of my self-consciousness enough to learn whether or not I can actually sing. I just need to figure out how I’m going to do that.
I have no ambition to be a lead singer, but I’ve done many things in my life because I was scared and wanted to force myself to take a risk. That accounts for how I ended up living and working in three different war zones. It’s funny, really; I wasn’t intimidated by snipers or minefields…but singing scares the Hell out of me. Go figure.
I’ve no idea where this path leads, but I’m grateful for the opportunity to unlock and revel in a part of myself I’d never owned up to. I may never find myself onstage with Pat Green playing “Whiskey” or “Cannonball,” but there’s something tremendously satisfying about having attained a skill level that allows me to sound as if I know what I’m doing.
Now if I could just get past my fear of singing….
