Back in tune

I stuck a battery in the harmonic tuner and finally got my guitar tuned again--I've been playing off key for a couple of days now and like all slight misadjustments in life the off-key stuff starts sounding normal.  Until you correct it, and suddenly it is quite truly music to the ears.

I've got this off again on again relationship with musical instruments.  Mostly off.  I played the piano when I was a kid for about 6 years, but one of my teachers was quite blunt with me when she told me that my parents were wasting their money.  Sounds harsh, I know, but I think she was making a point about my lack of discipline in practicing regularly.  And she was laughing all the way to the bank.

Playing the same tired blues and a few boogie riffs on the keyboard gets old quick when you don't develop the proper skills, so fast forward to about twenty years later and I decided to take some African drumming (specifically Ghana) lessons from my kids' music teacher.  Since my sense of rhythm is oh so acute I was a real success there.  It was actually amazingly complex in its simplicity--at one point the percussion was actually melodic. 

But that was short-lived.  At about the same time my wife and kids gave me a sweet Alvarez steel string acoustic guitar for Christmas, which became quite a beautiful dust collector (actually the "gig case" - such as it is - did the honors of providing the proper resting spots for the household dander) until I picked up a couple of those Easy Guitar or Whatever books at the local Borders and Noble.  I never knew that learning to play an instrument could be so unfulfilling.  That's not true, actually, as a book I picked up at Chuck Levin's, the local music mecca, began to open my eyes to the Progressive Rhythm method.  Insert joke here.

I self taught myself (repetitive redundancy there) on and off for several months until I stumbled upon this site.  This guy Justin has changed the way I play and practice, and while I still sound like a rank amateur, I have nowhere to go but up.  Kind of like bike racing.

So now I put in a solid 15 minutes a day (more if I can) and work on chords, chord changes, and scales, as well as some simple songs.  It's like training--I find it to be more productive if I do smaller bits more often than trying to weekend warrior my way through.  If I find the time I'll pay for some real lessons, but a small donation to Justin in London is the way to go for me right now.

So back to tuning the guitar--I will be tuning the other aspects of life, as my habits of late have gotten me into a rut of low productivity on all fronts, and that's starting to feel normal, which is not good.  It leads to chaos of sorts.  When it all starts to spiral out of control it takes an inordinate amount of time to fix it, so I may as well start fixing it now.  Like getting more sleep...good night.