(no subject)
After a hiatus of something like 20 years, I've taken up the guitar again. This is largely thanks to my beloved friend Bear, who lent me his brother's unused steel-string Martin Sigda. I'd been having a hankering to play again, but I wasn't sure I could. Hence the loan. And it turned out that I hadn't forgotten too much to return to it.
I'd stopped playing, all those years ago, because of a combination of paralyzing stagefright that had gradually left me unable to play when anyone was listening, and the lack of a decent instrument. I'd started playing when I was 13, on a guitar bought for less than $20 US in Mexico City's open-air market La Lagunilla (which name just popped into my memory, having laid dormant for 34 years, while the name of my barber has temporarily been misplaced. They call this aging. Just wait until it happens to you.) Anyway, it was a surprisingly good guitar, with a sweet sound (nylon strings) and very easy to play. It was stolen after I left college, and I couldn't afford anything better than a pawn-shop Yamaha, which was not anything like a good guitar. It sounded dull and was hard to play. Between that and the anxiety that made my fingers stumble and freeze up, it didn't seem worth bothering to play. So I stopped.
I had never been a really whiz-bang player, but I was good enough. I played classical at a not very sophisticated level, plus fingerstyle folk, rhythm, and bluegrass. I also played banjo, and when I got to college (I was a music history major concentrating on the Renaissance) I started learning the lute. Part of my performance anxiety, I realize now, was that I was comparing myself not to other amateurs, but to the professional musicians I heard on recordings. I was probably as good as any of my peers and better than most, but I didn't know that then. Now I hope I can relax a little, and not only enjoy playing by myself, but maybe have fun playing with other people, too.
After getting back into it with the borrowed guitar, I started researching nylon-string guitars, and realized what I didn't know when I was a teenager, that my lovely Mexican guitar was probably a flamenco instrument. Which is why other classical guitars never felt right (flamencos have a lower action and lighter construction which makes them sound...sprightlier, for lack of a better word.) I thought I'd get the best price online, but I didn't want to buy one without playing it, so I went to NY and picked the biggest music store I could find in lower Manhattan -- The Guitar Center on 14th St -- to try out my previously researched possibilities. One candidate was the Cordoba 30-F flamenco guitar, and I loved it, and the Guitar Center price was exactly the same as online plus they threw in a Humicase. I carried it home on the bus. While I was there, spending the entire morning playing dozens of acoustic guitars, I fell in love with an acoustic-electric Ibanez, God knows why I would ever need an electric pick-up. But boy did I want it. (I've always wanted to learn to play blues, which doesn't sound quite right on nylon strings -- so I did want a steel-string. Really.) I ended up buying that one, too, later (online). So now I have two guitars, plus my old banjo that I was waiting to try until I had some calluses back.
I've got calluses now, and enough left hand muscle to barre competently. My right-hand needs more coordination still, but it's getting there. I can't get my nails to grow, though. Gelatin never seemed to work when I was a teenager, but I'm going to try it, and also clear nail polish and see if that helps as it used to. I'd welcome advice on this not only from guitarists but also from Girls With Nails. (Spent too long as a butch lesbian, I guess.)
So, besides nail advice, I'm looking for people to play with, and also music to swap. I can read standard notation as well as tablature, and I can make my own guitar parts out of piano arrangements. I have several fake books of hits from the '70s, as well as Paul Simon and Cat Stevens songbooks and Carol King's Tapestry. Plus miscellaneous wimmin's music (Meg Christian, Chris Williamson, Alex Dobkin, one antho of mostly feminist folk). I am hoping to find folk music and standards and show tunes in piano arrangements. If anyone is interested in swapping photocopies, I'll post the entire contents of the books I've got. I also recently bought the Acoustic Guitar White Pages, which includes guitar transcriptions (all parts) in tab of a whole mess of '90's hits.
(Yes, I know this is copyright infringement. If sheet music was still the money-making business for writers that it was in the early 1900's, I'd care. But it's not. Now songwriters make their money from recording royalties, and file-sharing not photocopying is taking the bread out of their mouths. Okay?)
I have a fond fantasy of getting together with people who like to sing, and playing for them. (I'm not much of a singer, but I hope that after my voice changes, I'll get more comfortable with singing.) How about harmonica players? Fiddlers?
I don't know what might come of this, but I thought I'd put it out there and see. Since many if not most of the people on my Friends list are probably at the Fetish Flea (needless to say, I'm not -- bad lungs, flooding basement, and just couldn't deal with it, so I stayed home), I'll repost this after the weekend's over.
I'd stopped playing, all those years ago, because of a combination of paralyzing stagefright that had gradually left me unable to play when anyone was listening, and the lack of a decent instrument. I'd started playing when I was 13, on a guitar bought for less than $20 US in Mexico City's open-air market La Lagunilla (which name just popped into my memory, having laid dormant for 34 years, while the name of my barber has temporarily been misplaced. They call this aging. Just wait until it happens to you.) Anyway, it was a surprisingly good guitar, with a sweet sound (nylon strings) and very easy to play. It was stolen after I left college, and I couldn't afford anything better than a pawn-shop Yamaha, which was not anything like a good guitar. It sounded dull and was hard to play. Between that and the anxiety that made my fingers stumble and freeze up, it didn't seem worth bothering to play. So I stopped.
I had never been a really whiz-bang player, but I was good enough. I played classical at a not very sophisticated level, plus fingerstyle folk, rhythm, and bluegrass. I also played banjo, and when I got to college (I was a music history major concentrating on the Renaissance) I started learning the lute. Part of my performance anxiety, I realize now, was that I was comparing myself not to other amateurs, but to the professional musicians I heard on recordings. I was probably as good as any of my peers and better than most, but I didn't know that then. Now I hope I can relax a little, and not only enjoy playing by myself, but maybe have fun playing with other people, too.
After getting back into it with the borrowed guitar, I started researching nylon-string guitars, and realized what I didn't know when I was a teenager, that my lovely Mexican guitar was probably a flamenco instrument. Which is why other classical guitars never felt right (flamencos have a lower action and lighter construction which makes them sound...sprightlier, for lack of a better word.) I thought I'd get the best price online, but I didn't want to buy one without playing it, so I went to NY and picked the biggest music store I could find in lower Manhattan -- The Guitar Center on 14th St -- to try out my previously researched possibilities. One candidate was the Cordoba 30-F flamenco guitar, and I loved it, and the Guitar Center price was exactly the same as online plus they threw in a Humicase. I carried it home on the bus. While I was there, spending the entire morning playing dozens of acoustic guitars, I fell in love with an acoustic-electric Ibanez, God knows why I would ever need an electric pick-up. But boy did I want it. (I've always wanted to learn to play blues, which doesn't sound quite right on nylon strings -- so I did want a steel-string. Really.) I ended up buying that one, too, later (online). So now I have two guitars, plus my old banjo that I was waiting to try until I had some calluses back.
I've got calluses now, and enough left hand muscle to barre competently. My right-hand needs more coordination still, but it's getting there. I can't get my nails to grow, though. Gelatin never seemed to work when I was a teenager, but I'm going to try it, and also clear nail polish and see if that helps as it used to. I'd welcome advice on this not only from guitarists but also from Girls With Nails. (Spent too long as a butch lesbian, I guess.)
So, besides nail advice, I'm looking for people to play with, and also music to swap. I can read standard notation as well as tablature, and I can make my own guitar parts out of piano arrangements. I have several fake books of hits from the '70s, as well as Paul Simon and Cat Stevens songbooks and Carol King's Tapestry. Plus miscellaneous wimmin's music (Meg Christian, Chris Williamson, Alex Dobkin, one antho of mostly feminist folk). I am hoping to find folk music and standards and show tunes in piano arrangements. If anyone is interested in swapping photocopies, I'll post the entire contents of the books I've got. I also recently bought the Acoustic Guitar White Pages, which includes guitar transcriptions (all parts) in tab of a whole mess of '90's hits.
(Yes, I know this is copyright infringement. If sheet music was still the money-making business for writers that it was in the early 1900's, I'd care. But it's not. Now songwriters make their money from recording royalties, and file-sharing not photocopying is taking the bread out of their mouths. Okay?)
I have a fond fantasy of getting together with people who like to sing, and playing for them. (I'm not much of a singer, but I hope that after my voice changes, I'll get more comfortable with singing.) How about harmonica players? Fiddlers?
I don't know what might come of this, but I thought I'd put it out there and see. Since many if not most of the people on my Friends list are probably at the Fetish Flea (needless to say, I'm not -- bad lungs, flooding basement, and just couldn't deal with it, so I stayed home), I'll repost this after the weekend's over.