My New Instrument

For the past 5 months I've been teaching myself guitar, at first using my mom's ultra-crappy acoustic before stepping it up and buying my own crappy acoustic. Haha, no I am, of course kidding. Mine is not just a crappy guitar but a crappy guitar with a cool sticker that I sort of regret sticking on there. I've diligently memorized the basic major and minor chords. I've taught myself a few strumming patterns. I've restrung my guitar, and can now tune it thanks to the modern technology of the electronic tuner which makes up for the fact that I apparently can't distinguish between different sounds...like AT ALL. I've learned the riffs to about a dozen songs, mostly soft-indie or rock from the plethora of guitar tab sites online. Lately I've been experimenting with adding my voice, but I've found that my voice only goes with 1 in 5 songs I know and I am not comfortable with this ratio, so I'm going to stick to singing with my brother as my audience for the time being. Anyway, I'm writing this blog for several reasons. First, I felt I needed to write a lighter, more funny blog about something in my life, and I don't think I've blogged about my guitar adventures yet, so that seemed like an obvious choice. Second, is that today was the last school day before our nice secular holiday break. We had a half day today and half of the already shortened day was spent at our yearly "Christmas special". All of the kids who are either in band or in a theater group were gone from class for rehearsal and prep and many of my classes were pretty empty. I hung out with my friend Zak for the day and we got to talking about our song. From the beginning of the year we've been singing (in varying degrees of annoying volume) the song "Total Eclipse of the Heart" by Bonnie Tyler to each other in Foreign Policy because we thought that song best epitomized our feelings about life. Plus, last year when I watched this video, I realized it might possibly be the best song for a man to sing sarcastically. So today we decided it was time to upgrade our selection and we decided to run with "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" by Aerosmith. While it may not completely dominate "Total Eclipse of the Heart" in terms of manliness, it has the distinct advantage of being playable on the guitar. So today we memorized the lyrics and this afternoon when I got home from school I sat down in front of the computer with my guitar, went online, and checked out the tabs for the song intent on memorizing it so I could astonish Zak over vacation. At first it seemed pretty easy, no more than 5 or 6 different chords in all with some pretty easy patterns. Plus, most of the song consists of incomprehensible wailing so I thought I'd be able to pick it up pretty easy. I was cruising along until I hit some new chord I had never tried to play before. B Minor. Now, it is important to note that with there are several different ways to play a chord (similar to piano which I've played about 1000 times longer than guitar). The fingering the tab showed for this chord made it extremely impossible. Absolutely unplayable. I could get four of the five notes but that fifth one would end up sounding like a dying animal. And while I haven't verified this, I'm pretty sure the whole point of the song is love, not dead animals. So I was in a quagmire. I'm sure I'll look back on this some day, laugh merrily and say something along the lines of "Oh Andrew! You were so naive," as I'm playing B Minor chords with my eyes closed. But for right now, that chord is the devil. Like a cruel prank. Like Aerosmith wanted to tease me with a song I could almost play, "But let's throw in this joke chord!" Thanks guys.

Happy holidays,
Andrew