Learning to play

a story about more than guitars

I started playing the guitar in 2006. It was an instrument that I had always wanted to learn but I had been put off by my inability to read music. I’ve never been able to read sheet music. Trying to put all the lines, the dots and the symbols together was something that my brain couldn’t ever seem to get to grips with. Then and now it all looks like a scramble of shapes on a page that I don’t seem to be able to comprehend.

I still remember learning the violin as a child in Primary School. I was scolded repeatedly by my teacher for not being able to read music even after two years of playing. The thing is I could play the violin and I was in the school orchestra, but I just couldn’t read what was in front of me. I would learn to play by ear: memorising where the notes were, then memorising shapes that my fingers needed to make. Then I learnt each song by heart, including all the musical phrasing so that I didn’t need to be able to read music. But that wasn’t good enough. In the end I pretended to my teacher that I was getting better at reading music. When she did her spot tests and asked me to play a section of a composition, I could stare at the sheet music without having to worry because I had learnt all the songs in our repertoire by heart. 

That whole experience put me off playing music for another fifteen years. Until a colleague brought his guitar to work one day and I had a little go. He was good enough to be a session musician. The way his fingers danced along the fretboard was mesmerising. Watching him play (without any music in front of him) showed me what was possible, even without formal training. It sowed a seed in my mind: what if I could give it a go and see? I wasn’t aiming to be his standard, but I missed playing music. The guitar felt a bit more forgiving than the violin and I didn’t have to be able to read music in the traditional sense. So I decided to give it a try.

The timing was right. I had just come out of a long term relationship culminating in a house move. I was living on my own again and wanted something positive to take my mind off it. I think it was also the thrill of learning something new, and doing something just for me that made me all the more determined to give it a try. I wasn’t learning in order to be able to play classical masterpieces, I wanted to be able to play along to some of my favourite songs and have fun doing it. 

My aunt had given me her battered old classical guitar that she had used since she was a child. There was a sizeable split in the wood on the body of the guitar and there were big chips of wood missing from the bindings. All in all it was in a very sorry state. But I didn’t care, I loved it. Having recently divided assets in a painful break up, this old guitar was definitively mine, no matter what its state. A friend of mine re-strung it for me because I barely knew how to hold the instrument, let alone do any servicing on it. Then I just had to learn to play. 

I would like to say that this was the beginning of a long and exciting guitar playing journey. In an incredibly protracted way it was. Having decided to learn, I just needed to work out how I was going to do it. I was living in a town where there were no guitar teachers. In 2006 You Tube was a meek sliver of the behemoth that it is now, so finding guitar tutorials for beginners was slim pickings. My one guitar playing friend was busy with family commitments and couldn’t offer lessons; so I bought myself some books and tried to teach myself. 

It went very slowly. After about a year I managed to learn the main open chords. But I was frustrated at my pace and I didn’t really know if I was doing it correctly. With no-one to check that I had got anything right, despondence set in and I gave up. A long time passed before I decided to try again. Thirteen years in fact. 

The year 2020 had a different musical learning landscape with more lesson options available (despite the other major challenges of that year). I found that online group learning was ideal for me and I quickly became obsessed. After a period of time learning via Zoom, the lessons became in-person. My goals were the same as several years earlier: to be able to play along with some of my favourite songs and have fun. But it soon became something more serious as I discovered a love of songwriting. I’ll save that part of the story for another day. 

My aunt’s old guitar did very well for its age. After 61 years of service, it bowed out of use with several sound-altering cracks and a disintegrating top. I really loved that guitar. It was never the most aesthetically pleasing instrument (in the end I had bound parts of it together with tape). But it was the object with which I learned to play music in my own way. For that it takes pride of place amongst the other beloved artefacts stored in the museum of my mind.