It’s a benchmark, you know.
I have been playing ukulele for about a year now.
I am a scattershot student, preferring to experiment with hobbies rather than get serious about them and have actual expectations. Horrors. So, I am learning on my own, buying online courses to further my skill. I like playing, and I like not being beholden to anyone.
But there is one benchmark that all musicians (of a certain age, anyway) know. It’s one of those unspoken gates to becoming the real deal, particularly if you’re of an unspoken age. When you learn to strum or pluck this song, you have arrived at the courtyard to musician-hood.
That rarified air of musician-ness follows you about as you successfully pick out “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin. At least I think it does.
You learn this, particularly on a stringed instrument, and then you can say that you are a musician. Period. It doesn’t matter if you suck and plink out a note with the speed of a snail. You’re a member of the club. Wahoo!
I can play it pretty consistently. Hey, it even rocks a little if I don’t monitor myself too closely. As soon as I notice how it rocks, though, my fingers trip over each other. That time in the process, when I straddle the line between experience and awkwardness, is a tenuous time. My sudden awareness of how well I’m doing can, and often does, break concentration. How fast I recover that concentration, though — that’s the thing. Practice, practice, practice. Then practice some more. And don’t dread practice.
I can’t remember when music stopped being a creative outlet for me.
I enjoy it. It’s nice to have that feeling again. It’s the little things that surprise you about internalized negative self-talk. I sang throughout my childhood, and enjoyed it. Then somewhere along the way, I became self-conscious, concerned that I wasn’t good enough to sing in public. I had shut the doors to this place of creative refuge.
I play the uke almost every day. It’s a fun thing to focus my attention on. It’s making sense. I can anticipate what chords might come next, and use a verse to practice my fingerpicking. The cool thing about “Stairway to Heaven” is that it contains both fingerpicking and strumming. Yeah. It’s helped me a lot.
I am a musician because…in a tree by the brook, there’s a songbird who sings. Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven.
I want to be that songbird.
Soon I will open the door of making shared music, and I don’t know why this is such a nerve-wracking notion. But it’s the next step. In a while.
I’m currently learning “American Pie” by Don McLean now. Watch out, world.
