I had an audition yesterday. Yeah, kind of a weird thing for me to do, since I don’t perform, and I hate being judged (hey, I have a very fragile ego, so sue me). But it was tempered by the fact that it was our theater company looking to put together a music group, and the folks running the audition are good friends. So you think it wouldn’t be very intimidating, right? Yeah, sure. Songs I have played on my guitar a jillion times were suddenly ruined by ‘finger freeze up’ as my nerves got the best of me. Oh well, I pulled off the strumming portion better. I’m hoping we’ll get a group together to play around with.

I have been playing guitar since I was a kid. When I was nine my first acoustic nylon-stringed guitar was my birthday present. I remember I discovered it hidden in the closet and got yelled at for ruining the surprise. Oh well. I loved my guitar, and I tried to take lessons, but I had trouble getting anyone to drive me up to the music store so I missed most of them and didn’t get very far. So I played by myself until I was ready to go to college, and then for some reason I cannot fathom now, I decided to give my guitar to my brother, thinking I would need to concentrate at college and it would just be a distraction. How stupid was that?

So I went through college and five years in Yakima, and then when we moved back to Vancouver I went and bought one of those cheap electric guitar kits where you get a strat-look-alike and a little amp for $100. And I signed up for lessons with Mark Lengal at SW WA Music Studio. He was a great teacher, and I learned more from him the year or two that I took lessons than I had figured out on my own in ten. It was a lot of fun! But then I moved and it was too far to drive into town for lessons.

I eventually upgraded from my cheap electric guitar to a Martin dreadnaught, which I soon discovered was just plain too big for me. I could barely wrap my arms around it! It was very uncomfortable to play. Sure sounded nice though. Then one day I was at the local music store and hanging there among the regular size guitars was a little guitar – a ‘parlor’ guitar. It was a Takamine, made of beautiful red Koa wood, and it had the most heavenly sound, light and bright – not big and boomy like the dreadnaught. That was it, the Martin went up for sale, and for my birthday I got the Tak, and that has been my instrument ever since.

So, many years of playing, a few years of playing well 😉 It’s all fun, that’s all that matters. I play by myself a lot at home when I’ve got the place to myself. Now if I can just learn not to crumble from the pressure when I have to play in front of (or with) other people!

(click to see the cute and relevant cartoon)