I’ve never been someone who has ever made New Year’s Resolutions, but at the same time looking back at my blog post about learning musical instruments and inspired by Georgie’s blog post the other day, I’m going to do a bit of this:
If you’ve known me for a while, you know that I don’t love making yearly goals or resolutions, but I thought I’d write down a few intentions for the year.
I think the main thing that’s really triggered it is the fact that I’ve had my guitar for three and a half years now (plus the Ibanez JIVA I got at the end of 2022), and I still can’t actually play any songs. I’ve got the basic open chords pretty well down (I’m even managing to mostly get the F Major barre chord fully ringing out about 80% of the time), and I can play the C Major scale accurately and at a decent pace, but that’s not a lot for the amount of time that’s passed.
Well okay, I guess that’s not strictly true, I’ve done a bit of mucking around and recorded a few things, the most recent and one I’m most happiest with being this:
But I still can’t do any sort of string-crossing like I’ve been learning on the bass, so stuff like the song above is just me sticking to the one string and moving up and down the frets. I’m by far and away the best at the drums, and I really need to knuckle down and actually get into a proper practice routine with the guitar, so hopefully the act of writing this blog post will get me into gear!
The other thing I want to do more of this year is consistent miniature painting. I’ve been documenting my efforts getting through Warhammer Quest: Cursed City and I started out strong and ended up getting through half of the sixty miniatures in the box, but then… completely stopped painting anything. I managed to do half of my Navis Breachers in September but didn’t do the rest, and after that did only two of the smallest goblins from the Warhammer Underworlds warband Grinkrak’s Looncourt in October. After that there was a whole lot of nothing until I started the Vargskyr last week. I wouldn’t say it felt like work, but I was just really uninspired and blargh, and that’s not really a good headspace to be in for something that’s creative. You could make the argument that it was just burnout from having painted 32 miniatures over the course of like a month, but I’ve had this same pattern pretty much every prior year as well. So I think I’m going to try to just do a bit of painting each week and get something done, rather than going boom and bust. 🤞🏻
On a more positive note, one thing I have been enjoying doing is reading a couple of chapters of a book before bed. This has gotten me through the entirety (bar the last book) of the 41 books of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, all of Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, as well as Timothy Zahn’s Quadrail one. Most recently I’m doing yet another re-read of the very excellent Chronicles of the Shadow War trilogy, which is a continuation of Willow set fifteen years after the movie.
So yes, onwards and musically upwards!
My husband went through the journey of setting up an electric drum kit about a year and a half ago, and then bought a keyboard some time after that, and it’s been interesting watching his journey. He persisted a lot in the beginning, practicing a LOT, then took longer breaks due to time constraints. I’m almost jealous though—he learned a few small pop song melodies on the piano in a matter of days, watching YouTube videos of people’s hands and fingers moving over the keys and copying them, while I remember trying to read bloody sheet music on day 2 because I was classically trained. Like, how dare he have fun while learning?! 😂 My musical background is “my parents made me learn the piano, then I rebelled by teaching myself how to play every other instrument”. There is something markedly different about owning and controlling your learning experience as an adult, vs. whatever experience you had when you were younger. There is a lot out there in the way of learning music these days, and also pretty fascinating how different people learn.
It’s all about those little, manageable pieces we work on to get just a tiny bit better at something. I hope you make some steps with your guitar playing this year!
Nice! He might have already discovered this or something similar, but there’s a guy who does drumless backing tracks on Bandcamp in a whole bunch of different styles, and it’s SO FUN to play along to them all. And he includes two versions of each song, one without a metronome and one with.
Ahahaha. 😂 I did music in Year 7 and possibly 8, just because we had to, and that was it. I never had any natural aptitude and from what I remember it really wasn’t taught in any sort of interesting fashion that would make me think I could play anything or would want to. Thankfully my parents never forced me to do anything!
This is such a good observation. By Year 11 I was completely over school and studying, and to this day I have this automatic “DON’T WANNA” reaction to anything that would involve studying or learning something just for the sake of learning it. I need to be interested in whatever the thing is, and have an actual reason for learning it. Like for all of my computer programming stuff I’ve done, I’ve always had a specific project or outcome in mind before I got anywhere with anything.
100%, it totally is. Cheers! 😄