Two years of playing guitar
- […]
- Is it the harsh grief
- that pours out of you,
- your thrumming beats, or the
- buzzing of wings:
- is this what I’ll recall?
- Or are you
- more thoroughly thrilling
- in silence,
- the dove schematized
- or a woman’s hip,
- a pattern that emerges
- from its foam
- and reappears: a turgid, tumbled
- and resurrected rose.
- […]
from Odes to Common Things, Pablo Neruda
Two years ago, while visiting my parents for the holidays, I noticed an acoustic guitar in my brother's room. This is new, I thought. "Dad got it for me," he said in a disinterested tone. Curious, I took it back to my room, looked up some guitar basics, and began to play with it. My fingers pulsed with pain and self-hatred by the end of the hour, but a new world had opened up for me.
Shortly after returning to Vermont, a pandemic took storm. This prompted my lab to halt data collection, leaving me alone with long stretches of unoccupied time. I had taken the guitar home, but sadly it had been neglected up until this point. I had tried to learn too much at once—chords, scales, triads—when what I needed was something simpler, a focus on building immediate confidence and consistency. The key was diving straight into songs.
I started with Georgia by Vance Joy and fell in love with fingerstyle guitar. Think Stop This Train by John Mayer, Bloom by The Paper Kites, I Will Follow You Into the Dark by Death Cab for Cutie. It felt richer and more melodic than songs dominated by traditional strumming (which I later learned has its own subtle beauty and stylistic complexity). I had more fun playing this way too, despite the upfront difficulties. Perhaps from years of PC gaming, my fingers felt arthritic and clumsy as they each struggled to produce sound. But it got better the more I practiced.
What kept me going was the joy of witnessing consistent progress. Difficult song progressions and impossible chord shapes always became less so with time and effort. I would often wake up the next day and feel that my fingers were more fluid, my mind and body more relaxed when I practiced again. And soon enough the songs were mine. They weren't free from blemishes and technical mistakes, but they were my own. Sound had become music.
Song tutorials start to feel unsatisfying after a certain point. You still want to do exactly what that one musician on YouTube can do, their heads and bodies bobbing in unison with the flight of their nimble fingers across the fretboard. But you also want to know, like, how and why does it all work? How does everything fit together the way it does? You want to close down the open chords, break free from the cage of the CAGED system, go full System of a Down, and Rage Against the Machine of tutorial land.
This happened around the year mark for me. I had a few crowd pleasers up my sleeve—augmented by my preference for everything fingerstyle—but I had no sense of musicality, no feel for what was possible, no voice or groove of my own. I could play songs and noodle a tiny bit, but I sensed that there was much more to music than my ability to reproduce a song (duh). A return to the basics was needed. Theory, drills, strumming, picking, rhythm, ear training, listening. All necessary ingredients in developing as a musician of any caliber.
I had trouble with this because I had no idea how far I wanted to take my play. The guitar had become a refuge, a spiritual practice of sorts that centered me in difficult times, but I had no burning desire to be a musician. At the end of the day though I felt the nagging urge to improve. I wanted to understand and speak the language of music, even if it meant I had to babble for awhile. It brought me so much joy, so why not go deeper?
That's where I'm at now, two years later. I continue to learn songs from YouTube tutorials and have more music theory under my guitar strap. I have a couple of songs and melodies of my own too. The guitar feels less foreign, though I suspect it will forever remain a beautiful, humbling enigma. Brilliant musicians intuit the theory they need as they play, record, and perform. But the rest of us—the hobbyists and amateurs—need to learn (and practice) it daily, slowly, deliberately. Even Tomo Fujita—John Mayer's guitar teacher—drills the chromatic scale every morning before practice.
In the process you will stumble and drop your pick in the belly of your guitar for the millionth time, leading you to shake it overhead with the unconstrained fury of an adolescent gamer (oh, the poor poor guitar). Self-doubt will be a constant companion, but so too will grace and humility. Why keep going you might ask yourself when you will never be as good as John Mayer, John Butler, Jing Lin, Sungha Jung.
Because, some days, all it takes is a single note to bring you home. To make you feel safe, heard, understood, like all is right with the world. Some days those notes string themselves together and form something that awakens a dormant part of you. And then, if you're listening, your heart begins to sing.
How it started (around March-April 2020, Georgia by Vance Joy). I struggled so hard with this haha:
How it's going (short practice session, Like a Star by Youngso Kim). Still struggling, but with much more complex songs!:
Update Feb 3, 2023: Full version below: