My Musical Adventure

A Little Bit of Background

I have always loved music. As much as I love animals, really. At one point I went for a year or so without having internet access. I was never a big fan of the radio because my favorite songs are constantly being replaced by new ones. Yes, some of those become new favorites, but even they are played less and less eventually. The only radio I had to listen to was the one in the car anyway. We had others at some point or another, but I'm not really sure what happened to them.

Eventually, I got my own phone and could play my favorite songs on YouTube. But signal sucked so there was more buffering than music. Then my youngest sister introduced me to SoundCloud, an app where I could look up songs, play each one all the way through while connected to the internet, then be able to play them offline whenever I wanted. But most of the songs aren't even by the original singer and don't sound right, and if you have more than ten songs they stop working offline. I got so frustrated with this app I uninstalled it, it was good while it lasted, but . . .

My sister had also introduced me to yokee guitar, an app that allows you to "play guitar". You have to tap and swipe to the beat of music. I loved that game! But again, internet signal got in the way and the song list was very limited. Most of the good songs you have to pay real money to play and who's gonna spend real money on an app? Yet another app I eventually grew frustrated with.

I decided since I can't rely on the usual sources, I'll just have to learn to play music myself, that way I can hear whatever music I want, whenever I want to hear it. Of course it still wouldn't be sang by the original singers, but I needed something. I just can't stand silence!

So when my parents asked for me and my siblings to make our Christmas lists in 2019, I asked for a guitar. (We were too old to believe in Santa Claus and asking for things just felt wrong, but my parents loved to give gifts on Christmas and they always used the "want to get an idea of what you like" line). My dad has mentioned a few times how nice it would be to sit around a campfire at night with somebody playing an instrument. That's probably why that same Christmas, my parents got me my very own guitar. It is very beautiful, and I love it to this day. I can tell it's used, but that doesn't matter, because to me it was brand new, and no matter where it had been before, it's all mine now.

It didn't take long for me to get frustrated with it and give up learning how to play it altogether. The very same day, actually. Along with my guitar, I got a book of chords. I tried looking up music sheets because in my mind the best way to learn is by playing a song. But the music sheets I found didn't match the chords in my book. I got so frustrated I regretted even asking for the guitar in the first place. So while my brother played the video game he had wanted and my youngest sister listened to her CDs on her brand new radio, I had completely given up on learning to play my guitar not even an hour after I had got it.

At the beginning of the following year, I received a dummies book on how to play guitar. My biggest mistake was not reading the book cover to cover. Instead, I skipped to the part with music sheets and tried to match the notes given with the chords in the other book. It didn't take long for me to give that up either. It's a good thing my guitar has a case, or it would've sat there and collected dust.

It wasn't until August 2021 that I finally broke down and started reading the how to play guitar book page by page like a chapter book. And I learned why I couldn't match the chords with the music sheets. It's because the music sheets weren't written in chords, they were written in either tabs or standard notation. I learned that music written in tabs is so easy to read and play, it's like cheating on a test. Standard notation is hard to understand at first, but I only really need to read it to play a song I've never heard before (which is every song in that book). For songs I know really well (like my favorite songs), I only need to use tabs because I already know how it sounds, so all I need to know is what notes to play.

And this brings us to the part where I start actually playing a song! I have decided to play a song for my family when I go to my parents' house for Christmas this year. So I have decided that my first song will be Jingle Bells, it's simple and I've heard it so many times every year that I pretty much know it by heart.

And so it begins . . .