The first time I saw an electric guitar up close happened while I was waiting for my mom to finish the paperwork to rent my cornet for middle school band. It was a stratocaster type knock-off, red with white pickguard and it.was.beautiful! I ran my fingers across the open strings and the slight dissonance jarred me. The man behind the counter said out loud, "Would you like to learn that one instead?" and I thought to myself, "Could I ever play that instrument?" It seemed so complicated to me, 6 strings to deal with on both hands? The small things I had learned in the first few days of band class were still foreign to me! I told him "no" and left without much concern, though my mind kept wandering back to the red electric guitar.
It would be three more years before I sat down with my grandmother's acoustic to learn to play, urged on by both a quest to find my identity and the gift of free time that comes with being young. I had a few rudimentary chord charts and a pitch-pipe, yet things seemed to fall into place. . .
I realized that the instrument was, duh!, made for the hands! But the chords did not necessarily make sense to me alone. It took organizing them in a certain order that made it sound interesting to my ears. Of course this was a tortoise-paced, roundabout way of learning harmonic progression, but I wouldn't know that until it was made clear in studies at school.
If I had only said "yes" to the question years earlier would I now be light-years ahead in my skills? One can never say for sure. However when I see my students pick up something that took me years to learn in a few week's worth of lessons, I wonder. . .
I believe that telling yourself "no" before trying them can make easy tasks seem daunting. If we just give ourselves the benefit of the doubt we often find that the task is simple and not outside our abilities. At Matt Burk Music Studio, we can provide small insights into the instrument that YOU are interested in. We offer customized, private lessons in piano, guitar, drums, bass, voice, songwriting, and audio production. Matt Burk Music Studio: Learn, Create, Perform!
