![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivendellroseSo, I picked up the guitar again a few weeks ago for the first time in... at least two years? I'm quite sure I've hardly even picked it up since L was born. And L is actually the reason I picked it up again, in a way, because The Boy got out his guitar to try to learn some songs for L (like "Old McDonald" and "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider"), and I immediately thought "Oh, shit, I should try to play my guitar again, too."
Not because anything I can play is kid-friendly, mind. My repertoire is entirely sad folk songs and murder ballads. But just because seeing someone else play the guitar makes me feel like I should pick mine up again.
And... it was hard. At first, I was afraid I'd lost everything, and since I learned entirely by virtue of having a very patient teacher who figured out where I should put my capo to make songs easier and wrote out chord charts and finger-picking charts for me, and I basically learn everything by rote because I don't have the thing that lets some people just "noodle and figure things out" that would have been a total disaster. I've never learned a song on my own. I'm helpless, really. It's quite sad. But at least I can sort of play a few things.
But! Within the first night of practicing again I discovered that I had ingrained one song so deeply in my fingers that they remembered it even if my brain didn't, and since my brain still remembered the words, everything was okay. A week or so in, I can now play one other song pretty reliably, and am in the process of recovering another -- it turns out the finger-picking pattern that my teacher wrote out for that one was not the one that I settled on, and I never bothered to write down the diagram for what I was using, so I went through a lot of "No, I'm sure that's wrong..." before I figured that out. Now I just have to deal with the fact that my fingers don't remember how to transition between the chords very effectively, and from what I recall I was still dealing with a little of that on this song back when I quit, so... no terribly great loss, there.
In short, if I keep up with this I should be able to recover where I was at mostly in... a month? I think? Especially since I'm skipping the songs I never really liked all that much and sticking to the ones that I actually care about. There's at least one more that I want to get back. And then I can go about trying to nail down the ones that I was still flailing at when I was in lessons (one I'd been playing for a while but never quite got comfortable with, and one that I'd just started when I quit), and maybe look into one or two that my teacher had written out for me but that we hadn't got to... and then maybe, if I'm really doing well, I can try to pick up a song on my own.
Not because anything I can play is kid-friendly, mind. My repertoire is entirely sad folk songs and murder ballads. But just because seeing someone else play the guitar makes me feel like I should pick mine up again.
And... it was hard. At first, I was afraid I'd lost everything, and since I learned entirely by virtue of having a very patient teacher who figured out where I should put my capo to make songs easier and wrote out chord charts and finger-picking charts for me, and I basically learn everything by rote because I don't have the thing that lets some people just "noodle and figure things out" that would have been a total disaster. I've never learned a song on my own. I'm helpless, really. It's quite sad. But at least I can sort of play a few things.
But! Within the first night of practicing again I discovered that I had ingrained one song so deeply in my fingers that they remembered it even if my brain didn't, and since my brain still remembered the words, everything was okay. A week or so in, I can now play one other song pretty reliably, and am in the process of recovering another -- it turns out the finger-picking pattern that my teacher wrote out for that one was not the one that I settled on, and I never bothered to write down the diagram for what I was using, so I went through a lot of "No, I'm sure that's wrong..." before I figured that out. Now I just have to deal with the fact that my fingers don't remember how to transition between the chords very effectively, and from what I recall I was still dealing with a little of that on this song back when I quit, so... no terribly great loss, there.
In short, if I keep up with this I should be able to recover where I was at mostly in... a month? I think? Especially since I'm skipping the songs I never really liked all that much and sticking to the ones that I actually care about. There's at least one more that I want to get back. And then I can go about trying to nail down the ones that I was still flailing at when I was in lessons (one I'd been playing for a while but never quite got comfortable with, and one that I'd just started when I quit), and maybe look into one or two that my teacher had written out for me but that we hadn't got to... and then maybe, if I'm really doing well, I can try to pick up a song on my own.
