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Friday, April 29, 2011

The Musician without Rhythm

I always wanted to be a singer in a rock band. I never planned on playing guitar at all. There's reason for this, I have no natural rhythm whatsoever.

With singing, you can feel the music, take your cues from the drums and bass. There's a rhythm built for you. It was a hump I never really got over. I wrote some great lyrics. I'd stumbled through some interesting enough guitar parts, but I just couldn't put them together.

I started playing guitar as a way to have accompaniment (it's weird to see someone just singing by them self) and to have something to do during the parts of the song where there isn't any singing.

Like the thousands of other people in high school, I played guitar decent enough. There were always talks of starting a band and inevitably the bands would fall apart sometime after the first practice.

By the time I got to college I would say I was proficient. The problem being, I had no time to play guitar and there were thousands of other guitarists more proficient than me. I almost didn't play a single chord the last year of college until recently.

Work has been tough lately and one day at my bursting point I picked up my guitar and just started hitting chords as hard as I could. By the end of the day, my fingers burned. Calluses that had become soft were raised from my skin and the stress seemed to be gone from my body.

Over the past month I've been playing something like five hours of guitar a week. As much as I would still love to be a rock star, I still just don't have that natural rhythm. I have enough to get me by, and my voice is decent enough, but I doubt I'll ever play in front of a 3,000 person crowd. The few college classes that I played in front of will probably be the largest crowd I ever stand in front of, but I got a hell of a lot farther than most those guitar players at my high school.

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