While My Guitar Teacher Gently Weeps
Things have been busy lately. The feature film that I edited was finally picked up by a distributor, and I've been endlessly re-cutting the trailer to increase the likelihood that people will actually buy it. I managed to shoot three of my four comedy sketches, and while we work to make the fourth happen soon, I'm in the exciting stage of editing around the fact that we spent no money on them. I've been flexing my standup muscles with regular hosting gigs at The Village Lantern open mics, door work and occasional stage time at The Stand, and starting to explore new open mics across the city for the first time in months. And in the few minutes of spare time that remain, I'm trying to get a good night's sleep, be social, and take advantage of the endless free activities that go on during the summer in New York City.
Things have been busy. So why not add one more item to the agenda? I started taking guitar lessons a few weeks ago. It's a skill I've wanted to pick up for a long time, and as they say, there's no time like the present, even if there's no time in the present. This isn't my first foray into the world of music, or even the world of the guitar. I played the trumpet from third grade through high school, though I was never particularly good at it, due largely to the fact that I never practiced. However, I like to think that for someone who never practiced, I was actually quite good. Sure, I couldn't read music very well, but I could pick up most rhythms by watching the guy next to me a couple times and hoping he knew what he was doing. But even so, eight years of playing gave me about the same claim to the title "musician" that my eight months volunteering in a hospital gave me to the title "doctor."
Despite my lack of discipline, I always wanted to be a rock star, a dream shared by anyone who has ever been a ten-year-old boy. And while brass instruments may be beautiful in the right time and place, they tend not to be the most welcome additions to the rock environment. Aging rock bands who begin adding horn sections to their stage shows tend to be met with the same blend of shock and disgust as Dylan going electric, but without the benefit of time eventually proving them wrong.
Back in 2003, I used my first ever paycheck from working in film to buy my very first guitar, a Fender acoustic. I figured that art should fuel art, but I decided to ignore the ominous sign that the original "art" in question was a film camp for high school students, and my own "art" was likely to be of the same caliber. Instead, I decided to focus on the idea that I was probably a latent child prodigy, and the mere act of picking up the instrument that I was destined to master would immediately result in all the women who wouldn't go out with me beginning to swoon and involuntarily fling their underpants and paychecks in my direction. With a clear goal in mind, I printed out a few songs from the Internet, and set about the task of teaching myself the guitar.
Unfortunately, my plan hit a bit of a snag when I realized that despite my undeniable musical genius, I'm not a very good student or a very good teacher, and it turns out that neither of us had the faintest idea what we were doing. But I remained undeterred, and I stayed the course, practicing diligently. Every day. For a couple weeks. Then I encountered my first F chord, which at the time I assumed stood for "fucking impossible." The handful of other chords I'd been working with had been difficult, sure. But with enough repetition I was able to make them sound more or less like music. But the F chord was a different beast. According to the chord book I'd gotten from my dad, you're supposed to hold down the bottom two strings simultaneously with nothing but your index finger, a task which seemed about as unrealistic as holding up a bank by pressing the inside of my coat pocket with the very same finger.
With my first real failure under my belt, I decided that I lacked the music gene that can make fingers and strings act as one, and my guitar began to sit unattended, more a symbol of the lifestyle that I wished I was living than a way to achieve it. Every year or two I would pick it up and try to learn again, until I was inevitably bested by that insufferable F chord. It was my nemesis, my Moriarty. It was my Vietnam, though I always had the good sense to pull out before things got embarrassing.
Then after maybe five or six years, I picked up ol' Kathleen (as I had named my guitar, after one of the many songs I couldn't play on it), and as if by magic I finally succeeded in forcing my fingers into the right configuration to produce a clear, beautiful F. I was amazed. I beamed with pride. I was ecstatic. That ecstasy lasted for about a week, when I realized that this was not the final hurdle I needed to clear before fame and fortune, but rather the first in a series of increasingly difficult hurdles. I still had a very, very long way to go before I could call myself competent, much less good. And the guitar soon found itself demoted once again from musical instrument to decoration, while the throngs of screaming fans and loose women kept to themselves.
Then ten years later, all that changed. (Except for the part about me not being a musical prodigy, which as remained pretty consistent.) I'd mentioned to my girlfriend that I wanted to learn to play the guitar. And by "mentioned that I wanted to," I mean "continuously whined about how I couldn't." Motivated in equal measure by desires to help me achieve me achieve my dreams and shut me up, she got me a gift certificate for an eight week guitar class at The New York Guitar Academy for our anniversary. I always believe in trying anything if I don't have to pay for it, which is why I'm glad I've never met a dealer whose business model really includes the first one always being free. So I agreed to try for a fresh start and signed up for a class.
The adult education sector has probably suffered since the advent of the Internet. People used to take cooking classes to learn a new skill and meet people with similar interests. But now that you can print out any recipe ever concoted at the push of a button, watch instructional videos for free on YouTube, and use dating sites to meet people without all the hassle and pretense of buying a wok, I think people are less inclined to pay for for professional lessons of any kind. But as we've already established, my track record for teaching myself new skills isn't the greatest. After years of using the Internet as my guitar coach, you could round what I knew about music down to zero and still feel pretty generous. So the idea of having a professional slap my wrists with a steel ruler sounded like it might be a might be more productive for a guy like me.
When I went to my first lesson about a month ago, it was the first time I've taken any kind of class as an adult. (Legally speaking, I've been an adult in college, but if you've ever met a 22-year-old, you know how little legal status really means.) I was a little nervous, but pretty hopeful because it seems like learning as an adult would be easier than it is as a kid, because you've picked up so many other skills on the way. You already know how to read, and avoid reading with CliffsNotes. And when you've woken up the day before your final exams and realize you've been drunk since freshmen orientation enough times, you've probably picked up a couple last minute studying skills. A lot of the basics are already in place, so you can focus on the truly new aspects of your material.
But it's odd to actually try to learn something new as an adult because you realize that for all the things that you have learned, you've forgotten one very crucial skill that every child possesses: the ability to be really, really bad at something and not notice. As a kid, everything is so new and there's so much to learn that you have this great ability focus on the little accomplishments rather than how much further you have to go. Teach a kid to play three blind mice on the recorder, and he thinks he's ready to be the next Justin Bieber. All he needs to do is sit back and wait for the limo to show up and drive him off to Show Biz.
But learning is different when you're an adult, because you've learned how to distinguish between Jimi Hendrix and a wino strumming three chords on the subway between shots from the paper bag. In our first lesson, we learned a couple chords I already sort of knew, started working on a very simple strumming pattern, and despite the ease and familiarity of the material, I still sounded like a complete novice who didn't even know which end of a guitar to blow, and what's more, I knew it. Even though it was a class for beginners, and only the teacher could claim to be better than me at that point, I still felt embarrassed by how bad I was. It's the same feeling I got when I learned to swim a couple years ago. When you're pushing 30 and find yourself desperately flailing and gasping for air in water that isn't even deep enough to drown a hedgehog, it's hard not to look at a kid whizzing by like Aquaman on amphetamines and not think that you should already know this by now. After five minutes of banging away tunelessly at a guitar like a monkey with a typewriter, all you can think about is the number of people who have mastered this skill and still aren't even old enough to shave. And then you inevitably start thinking, "It's broken! This one doesn't play stairway to heaven!"But even though the experience started out as frustrating as ever, I noticed something pretty quickly that had never happened to me when playing the guitar before: I started sounding better. For me, it really did help to have a teacher who already knows how to play and didn't just find your lessons on the internet five minutes ago. With his instruction and patience, I quickly graduated from playing Stand By Me poorly to playing Yesterday poorly, and I'm currently working on playing House of the Rising Sun poorly. Which is already way more songs than I could ever play poorly before, and I'm playing them a little less poorly with each passing week.
In part my progress is due to the expertise that comes with a real teacher. Obviously, he can explain or demonstrate things that don't quite make sense when you just see them on paper, which is very helpful. But equally helpful is that a teacher helps you to really hear yourself improving. In our first lesson, he was very up front about the fact that when you first pick up a guitar you will be bad, and you will continue to be bad for a very long time. Then as the weeks progressed, he's been very encouraging about the progress we have made rather than how far we have to go. While some of his praise may be little more than shameless ego stroking, since childhood I have failed to learn the difference between that and genuine approbation the way I learned to distinguish Hendrix from the wino. And when you're alone in a room, all you can hear is the mistakes you're making and the self-flagellation that follows. But when you have someone else there to talk you down and point out the subtle shades of bad that you are in fact working through, you get back that ability to see the progress at hand rather than the journey ahead.
For me, the key to sticking with something is rekindling that childlike ability to stay in the moment, focus on what you're doing right, and not worry so much about what you're doing wrong. If I can do that, it's a lot easier to stick with something I'm doing badly in the hopes that I will eventually do it well. Or at least less badly. Either way, I'm motivated by a childish sense of pride in my most minor accomplishments, and an equally childish sense that those accomplishments will be rewarded with ice cream. And as an adult with any amount of money in my wallet, I know that they always will be. Sometimes they'll be rewarded before I accomplish anything as well. Did I mention that I have no discipline?
-TC