So, in true new-musican fashion, I started off thinking that I was going to be bad, but be able to pull something together eventually. Just as Turkle describes the new generation's need to respond to a text immediately, I felt that I needed immediately understand and be able to play chords on the guitar and use Live. 6 hours later, I stared at my broken guitar and computer running some software that is way to complicated for me to figure out alone, and a random 'instrument' I made while my computer freaked out for the uptenth time. It was suddenly 2:30am, and all I had accomplished was ensuring that I would be doing the majority of my work the following day, after an early morning practice. Here's a summery of my first night as a struggling musician.
Maybe the most common and readily available, yet the most complicated and impressive instrument, the guitar entered my life as my tool for the first time in a LONG time. As a young kid (6 years ago), I took guitar lessons for a few weeks, but after learning how to play a few green day songs from their new album, I ended up dropping guitar to continue my saxophone lessons. I had borrowed my brother's electric guitar for those lessons, but I have since fallen in love with the acoustic guitar. The ability to play without any electronics is fascinating, and playing chords and scales instead of random tabs and power chords is a huge step up. Rather then go out and spend hundreds of dollars, I went home and ended up borrowing my mother's old guitar from her childhood. My brother's acoustic was also at home, but it only had five strings so I went with mom's nylon guitar (there are two types of guitar strings, nylon and steel. Steel are more rugged and have a harder should, but hurt your fingers when you are starting out, causing blisters and eventually calluses. Nylon strings do not hurt your fingers, but sound and feel softer and quieter.) Anyway, I returned to school with a guitar and a chord book. I thought it would be a good idea to quickly run through all the chords before I went in and learned each one in depth. Three chords in (it was a C chord), for whatever reason, I managed to break a string. Now I thought about going on without the string, but even though I'm new to music, I know a bad sound when I hear one. I decided to put guitar on hold until I made it into town to get new strings.
Next I opened Ableton Live in an attempt to maybe make a very basic mashup or an extremely simple house song. I know the basics of ableton, but once it came to editing, beat matching, play delay, semi-continuous loops, and cueing, I suddenly realized I was WAY over my head. I spent the next 5 1/2 hours searching for a way to make a vocal track come in 7.3.2 measures late, or how to match up a new beat with a random lady gaga vocal track that has a similar bpm (beats per minute). Long story short, I ended up with many loops repeating, no real song, and a realization that this was going to be extremely difficult. Fortunately, a few of my friends are DJs who use Live regularly, so I'm going to get a few pointers from them before I attempt another mashup.
At some point during the night-I'm not really sure when-I decided to clean up my desk and throw away some of the junk on my desk. This included the old keyboard from my laptop that was replaced because Apple used faulty plastic. As I was going to throw it in the trash, my hand happened to flick a springy piece of metal on the underside of the keyboard. It vibrated, creating a sound and sparking my imagination. I took the keyboard back, and re-bent all of the pieces of springy metal so they were easier to flick. I then proceeded to "play" this new instrument until my roommate told me it sounded like crap and wasn't really that cool. While I understand it sounding rather bad, I personally think that it is really cool to take random objects, and use them in a way they were not intended to be used, thereby creating music. I'm going to try to keep this up, and see what the most creative instrument I can come up with is.
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