I've written before about how important music is to me, and about how I used to play trumpet and sing in church choir and all that good stuff. But I haven't yet written about my earliest aspiration, even before my ridiculous astronaut and gas station management dreams (see "My Place in this World").
I wanted to be a Beatle.
 |
| 1964 Ed Sullivan Show appearance (from dmbeatles.com) |
My dad LOVES the Beatles. All caps aren't enough to emphasize just how much he loves them. So I grew up listening to their records, sitting with my dad while he played their songs on the piano, and saving up money for their cassette tapes when I first started to get an allowance.
Eventually, I got a toy guitar and pretended to play along with my dad - and I pretended to be a lefty, just like my favorite Beatle, Paul McCartney.
 |
| Paul McCartney (from beatlephotoblog.com) |
Fortunately, or not, there are no pictures of this of which I am aware. LOL.
In any event, I still love the Beatles' music, but what emerged from that early interest was a desire to play guitar and sing. I did my singing in church choir (and in the shower and in the car) but I never did take guitar lessons.
Anna thinks I should start. Last weekend when we were playing upstairs in our guest room/ meditation room, she discovered a guitar that a friend had left at our place. And she wanted me to show her how to play.
I tried to show her what playing might look like.
.JPG) |
| Fake it 'til you make it, right? |
But that's pretty much as far as the lesson went. I even had to remind myself to hold it correctly - all those childhood days of pretending caused me to pick it up as if I was going to play left-handed. And I'm really too old to pretend to be Paul anymore. ;)
I was able to strum a few notes but didn't know how to play any songs, which was disappointing for her. So I gave her a shot.
.JPG) |
| "Not as easy as it looks, mom!" |
What do you think, people? Should I take guitar lessons?
One idea might be to learn the four most common chords on the Internet, which can allow you to play thousands of songs....practice playing them to sound nice and then just enjoy playing and singing songs with those! The hardest thing is that it hurts your fingers at first until you build callouses, and you gave to play often and regularly to build and maintain the callouses. If you're buying a guitar, the nylon string hurt your fingers less, but are used more for classical guitar playing (most classical guitar is Spanish and technical....I love that and I learned to play some, but it has less application in our lifestyle and fo enjoying singing well known songs). Steel string give a loud steely sound that sounds more appropriate for song singing, but like I said, will hurt your fingers more.
ReplyDelete