My Fingers Hurt

Many many years ago, after my brother and I completed few years of basic musical studies, it was time for us to choose a musical instrument to learn. I chose the accordion, my main reason being to uncover the secrets of the bass-side keys. Strange as it may seem, being driven by curiosity and being indifferent to subjective aesthetic preferences is still who I am, mostly. My brother, on the other hand, chose the guitar. We experimented switching a few times but we never really cared to teach each other the intricacies of each one's musical instrument.

Funny thing is, the reason this blog was started is my brother letting me have a go at his guitar recently and jokingly daring me to outperform him in a musical duel. Even if that session was short, it was then that I had the idea of using something I had no real knowledge of as a "mental stimulant". Add regularity to that and you get this blog. It's ironic how my brother has been consistently denying to help me have a guitar lesson as a novelty for this blog.

That is, until today. He finally agreed to give me a 1-hour lesson in playing guitar and I jumped at the opportunity. So, here I am, after completing it, my left hand index finger numb and hurting with each keystroke it is used on.

First thing he did was tell me which fingers are used and how. He made me do a little exercise for a while to get used to the idea:

Next, I did a fairly similar exercise, only for the left hand:

Soon, after that, I began playing the first song I was to learn, Sur le pont d' Avignon . It took quite a bit of time but after a while I was able to play it well enough:

After that, my brother didn't seem to be certain on what we should be doing next. He tried to teach me a technique to play a note with just the left hand. After I failed again and again he decided that it was too early for that. Then, he made me do an exercise to stretch the fingers, which was somewhat painful. After I failed to make any real progress with that, he grabbed the guitar and played a song of his own. After that, he took out one of his old books and he started teaching me to play a second song, Der Weihnachtsmann. Unfortunately, the time was up long before I could play it well.

I enjoyed playing the guitar, it's a neat instrument, if a bit painful at times. I guess you get used to it. I also began to understand how the exercises and the songs made me better in playing the instrument in general, not only the specific exercise. It's one thing knowing that in theory and a completely different thing experiencing it in action. It's very difficult to notice it in higher levels of practising something. So, the fact that I was new to this helped in identifying the procedure.

Pigs and Cats

Today I tried drawing. I can't really draw, my most impressive creation being a house I designed when I was a fourth-grader. There's a silly story behind it too. The teacher was so impressed with my ruler-based creation that told me I should lead a class drawing project. It was about making a poster-sized version of a picture in one of our school books. I tried to tell her but she wouldn't listen. I'm not sure whether the problem was my own lack of self-confidence or that I really couldn't do it, but I failed. I gave up the project completely to someone else and I must say I remember it being pretty embarrassing. It's ironic, too, since my mother likes painting and drawing a lot, while I turned out shying away from it.

So, I googled "drawing lesson" and first found drawingcoach.com. I immediately went for the easiest tutorials and ended up starting to draw a pig. It was rather frustrating and I felt like something was amiss. When I came across a spelling mistake (which, in retrospect, seems like a silly reason to lose faith in a drawing-tutorials-site), I decided to look for something else. I came across drawspace.com. Then, I realised: there's no degree of proficiency one can get with one hour's worth of drawing. Besides, it requires proper tools and some studying before beginning. Which means I should plan ahead for future activities: I need to find things which spending one hour for isn't completely pointless.

I went back to the pig. I filled a page with the annoying little creature. When I was content with myself (read: "when the page was full") I went for the next one: the cat. That was really difficult. It took me half an hour to do the first one and by then it was already 5. Especially the nose; I ended up searching for videos of drawing cats in my strugle to interpet what a specific instruction in the tutorial meant:

Draw two diagonal lines sloping towards the middle of the head. These lines should almost touch at the middle. Add a curve to the bottom of each of the diagonal lines to form the nostrils.

Still, there was a certain point, while drawing the cat, that the frustration I had for my lack of skills turned into something else, something wonderful. I felt compelled to try to improve my drawing, to do everything again, to do it correctly. I'm not sure if I was right in enforcing my own rules and stopping when the time was up, instead of going on. That's something I'll have to consider carefully.

I hope I'll find something good to do tomorrow. Maybe I will finally convince my brother to give me that guitar lesson, who knows!