Entries from February 2008 ↓

[Abstract: This post continues the "Learning to Play a Song Series." It discusses three different things to consider when picking your first song to play.]

So, you’ve picked what instrument you want to play. You may not realize it but you’ve made a major step towards learning to play your first song, since, by choosing the instrument, you’ve narrowed your choices down to what you can play. If you’ve chosen the bass guitar, there’s no sense in trying to learn to play a song that’s driven solely by rhythm guitar. One word of wisdom when it comes to learning a song: creativity needs boundaries. By you choosing your instruments, you have created a boundary in which creative energies can be channeled.

Where do you go from here? Here are some things to consider when choosing what song you’ll learn to play:

Consideration #1: What type of song do you want to learn to play?

This one choice has the most impact on how well you’ll learn and how well you’ll stick to playing and practicing. If you choose a song that doesn’t really motivate you, odds are you won’t stick with it and hence won’t learn to play the song. Additionally, if you pick a song whose style you are completely unfamiliar with, you will have a hard time learning to play it, whether or not it’s intrinsically difficult or not.

Here’s something else to be very mindful of: music has a very powerful impact on one’s moods. If you’ve chosen a song and find yourself in a mood that’s wildly different than your natural mood after playing it for a while, odds are its the music and not you. This can work to your advantage: playing peaceful music when you’re having a bad day can work wonders for one’s psyche; sometimes playing music that lets loose the darker side of you can be therapeutic, as well. If you are religiously inclined, worship music can be a powerful way to center yourself and you get the two-for of learning an instrument and worshiping at the same time.

Bottom-line: take a minute or two and think about what type of song you want to play. Choose one that motivates you, is close to the type of music you most often listen to, and that puts you in the mood you want to be in.

Consideration #2: How difficult is the song to play?

It can be difficult for someone just learning to play to assess how difficult a song will be to play. There are some quick ways to figure it out, though it may require a somewhat trained ear.

First, listen to the tempo of the song.

Faster songs are generally harder to learn to play, as you’ll generally have to have quicker fingerwork to keep up. Additionally, it’s also harder to discern notes and chords when they’re speeding by you. If possible, choose a slower song so that you can play along with it once you’ve practiced it a bit. Trust me, in the long run you’ll be happier, unless, of course, you listen to a lot of fast music and the slower music puts you to sleep.

Listen to how quickly the main notes change


This comment is mostly focused on the guitar. Every song has a basic structure of chords that it fits in called a key. This key is the range and types of notes that can naturally be played within the song. (I’m keeping this really basic, as explaining keys and chords can be quite complex and the explanation is probably counterproductive for the beginner.) What you’re listening for is how often it seems that there’s a chord change within the song; more chord changes equate to more finger work and, at the beginning stages, more frustration.

Also, if a song has a really screaming solo, there’s a good chance that it’s difficult to play, as musicians, just like anyone else, love to show their ability to do the difficult. While I’m not saying you should shy away from really intricate solos, be aware that they’re not going to come easy. You’re far better off learning to play easier songs at the beginning, which is why most music teachers start with the easy stuff first and then build upon it.

Listen for key changes


Here I am back to key changes, I know. If you’re listening to your song and you notice that, all of a sudden, all of the musical instruments and the vocalist take a step up or down, what you’ve probably just heard is a key change (normally songs key up rather than down). I advise you to avoid learning such a song for your first song.

Here’s why: songs without key changes normally have somewhere between three to five chords in them (four being really common). To learn how to play those songs, all you have to do is learn those three to five chords and how they’re put together. (Yes, I made it sound much easier than it is for a beginner) Songs that have key changes, however, may double the amount of chords you have to learn, as the different keys require different chords. Sometimes you get lucky and only a few chords change, but that style puts a large burden on you to remember which chords go in which position when they’re played.

If it doesn’t violate consideration #1, choose a song that’s slower, has less chord/key note changes, and does not have a key change.

Consideration #3: How common is the song?


Many people overlook this consideration when choosing their first song only to figure out it kind of sucks to only know a song that few other people know. Part of learning to play for most people is the idea of sharing the song, and, perhaps, play along with someone else. Having someone listen to a song that their unfamiliar with puts both the new musician and the listener in a weird position: unless it’s an immediately catchy song, the listener takes a while to catch on to it and the musician feels a bit awkward playing it, and if the person listening to the song isn’t responding with the enthusiasm that the new musician hoped for, the musician’s motivation for learning to play the song can be sapped.

If your goal is to play music with other people, learning to play a less well-known song undermines your goal; what you’re in essence doing is making twopeople learn a song they’re unfamiliar with. It’s especially problematic to learn difficult, uncommon songs, as it’s really hard for people to wing it on a song that they can’t play back in their head.

Whenever possible, pick a song that’s really common, presuming, of course, that it doesn’t violate Consideration #1.

If you can stomach it, the easiest way to learn a song is to pick one off a Top 40 list. Yes, they’re pop songs, but generally pop songs are not very difficult and are nearly universally appealing. You’ll no doubt find many people who are familiar with the song, so you’ll have plenty of potential prospects to play for and many more prospects to play with. Additionally, pop songs feature the core types of chord variations, structures, and arrangements that the Western ear has been trained to hear and find pleasing; training yourself to learn to play these songs and hear how they work will serve you well as you learn to play more songs.

The next post in this series will discuss how to analyze your song and begin learning the parts of it.

[Abstract: This brief post discusses some of the changes to this blog.]

After several hours of tinkering with CSS code and trying to figure out where my titles went, I have completed an update to the look of APPD. I have also reinstalled some new plugins.

New Look

• Changed the font to be bigger and more readable–Century Schoolbook makes a great paper font for real paper, but it’s not the most reader friendly online.
• Changed the tannish look of the background to white. The original intent was to make the site look like you were reading a paper, but that look didn’t work so well.
• Numerous other color optimizations focused mainly on readability.

New Features

• Added Tag-this plug-in to help with tagging the articles. Please help me out with tagging my posts, as this is something that I have trouble doing. I still get tags and categories mixed up.
• Added Star-rating of posts to see what people are actually interested in. My past two posts have been muses primarily for me, but I’m much more interested in writing stuff that people want to read. At least, I mostly am.
• Added other under the hood plug-ins to help with maintenance and faster reading and loading. One of these days I’ll blog about what plugins I use, as that seems to be the thing to do.

I’ll also try to keep up with the abstracts of my posts so that you know what you’re getting into. My last post was a long one and it seemed at least courteous to let you know what you were getting into.

If you like or dislike some of the changes, please let me know, if nothing else so that I don’t fill like I’m writing out into the void.

(Abstract: This post discusses the three different types of digital residents and how the way we orient ourselves to the digital world has a dramatic impact on how we interact with each other and how we live our lives.)

I was at a military ball last weekend and MG Robert Bailey was the guest speaker. His discussion centered on the different types of digital residents and how we must focus on recruiting, retaining, and employing the newest generation of Americans. I’ll discuss the themes he brought out and flesh out the ideas and implications a bit more.

First, imagine two separate land masses separated by a river. On the one side of the river, we have the analog continent. The people who live on this side of the divide are predominantly older and grew up before many of the technological developments that are now part of the fabric of our society, such as calculators, televisions, computers, microwaves, etc (Yes, there are some still alive, and they likely aren’t reading this blog, anyway). Personal interactions between the residents on this side of the divide are primarily physical and fixed in simultaneous space time; when people from this side of the divide visit, they do so in (physical) person in the same (physical) room. Their way of life is defined by physical mediums–i.e. writing checks, spending cash, writing letters, standing in line, etc.

On the opposite side of the divide is the digital continent. The people who live on this side of the divide are predominantly younger (than, say, twenty-five) and grew up after the invention of the modern digital way of life; they are so young, in fact, that many of them cannot remember cassette tapes, VCRs, TVs that have antennas, and landline phones. Personal interactions between the residents on this side of the divide are primarily non-physical and often are not contemporaneous; they “meet” people in chat rooms, converse through text messaging, identify themselves by avatars, and may never (physically) meet their closest friends. Their way of life is defined by digital mediums; they don’t write checks and spend cash (they have debit cards, credit cards, and Bill Pay), they reserve their place in line by searching for the restaurant on their cell phones and calling ahead, they send emails discussing their feelings with their friends, and they may even blog about some of the most intimate details of their personal lives online.

The river that divides the continents is the digital divide. It is the axis of analysis and explanation that we use to manipulate and understand the world. It’s critical to understand that the American way of life is always moving towards the digital continent away from the analog continent.

The people who live on the analog continent are digital transients (sidebar: MG Bailey calls them digital illegal immigrants, but I’m not fond of that metaphor). They come over to the digital continent if they have to, and when their tasks are done, they leave and go back to the comfort of the physical. To them, “friends” are those you know and spend time with in person, and the idea of calling someone who you’ve never seen or met a friend is just a mis-application of the word. These are the people who call up their children to find something on the “World Wide Web” (hint: if someone refers to the Internet as the World Wide Web, it’s a good bet that s/he is a digital transient) and spend more time trying to explain what they’re looking for than it takes their children to find it. They mistrust online shopping and have one credit card that they keep for emergencies. Knowledge, to a digital transient, is collected and retained; their information intake is far more limited, but what they do learn they encode and remember inside their heads.

In between the digital transients and the last category of digital residents are the “digital immigrants.” These are the people who grew up along with modern technology and have to sit down and learn how to use the new devices as part of their lives. They are in many ways similar to the last category of digital residents, but what separates them is that the digital immigrants have to process and think about new devices and, like the digital transients, are much more likely to resist learning and changing with the technological wave they find themselves on. They must see a manifest problem that a technological device solves before they will adopt it and spend the time it takes to learn to use it.

The “digital natives” are those that know no other world than the digital continent. They learn, adapt, and change not because they have to but because it’s just part of them; they embrace change and new technology not out of principle but rather because changing and learning is almost a reflex. These are the people who can code webpages without knowing how or where they learned to do it, pick up camera phones and iPods and use them without ever looking at a manual or help page, and can master complicated video games in hours rather than days. They often times are eluded by the simplest habits and hacks from the analog side (such as swinging a hammer or airing up the tires on their car) but can find and have the nearest mechanic come look at their car in seconds. Knowledge, to a digital native, is not collected and retained but rather shared and disseminated; they also are prone to think of knowledge as something that is searchable rather than rememberable.

Human perception is largely scripted by metaphors; we orient ourselves to our world not by what’s actually around us but by how we think about those things around us. Understanding that other people may orient themselves to the digital world differently can help smooth over tensions and help build meaningful relationships for both parties. Expecting digital transients to understand the importance of “virtual” friends from within the perspective of a digital native is a lost cause; someone has to be able to translate the worldview from the one side to the other (digital immigrants are often very good at this). Likewise, explaining to digital natives why digital transients do not have a need for email accounts from within the natives’ worldview is also destined for failure.

What we have to realize is that one side of the divide is not innately better than the other; they are just different ways of orienting oneself to the world. One size does not fit all when it comes to worldviews; to help each other flourish, we must think about the setting in which we flourish. We must, however, remember the Aristotelian insight: humans are social, spirited, physical, and rational animals. Our environments and settings change; our natures do not.

Most of our conflicts come not from malice but rather from miscommunication. The problem of the digital divide exacerbates our failures to communicate by making it not only an issue of what we say but also how we say it, i.e. what medium we communicate through. Think about those around you and what type of digital resident they are and how that affects your interactions.

The other night a student asked me, “don’t you ever get tired of dealing with stuff that doesn’t have answers?” This question deserves some consideration.

The first thing you might think is that just because we don’t know the answer doesn’t mean that there’s not an answer. Another way to say it is that though it’s not clear there is an answer, it’s also not clear that there’s not one. Sometimes just recognizing that there’s not an easy answer improves our thinking about the question.

The second thing we may think is just because we don’t know the answer doesn’t mean we can’t know what the answer couldn’t be. The history of ideas informs us that we’ve often come to some of our most brilliant insights by shutting the door on ways the world couldn’t be. Questions such as our spatio-temporal place in the universe improved considerably once we figured out that we couldn’t be the center of the universe. Knowing that closes the door on those options and makes us focus harder on the hypotheses that are still on the table.

Of course, we may think we know the answer, but the healthiest position, about anything and especially the most important things, is that we don’t know if we’re right but make the jump anyways. We can’t spend our entire life withholding belief in the substantive questions that plague us…we have to fix the ship while we’re at sail, as it were. Of course, we don’t get this on the cheap, and we have an obligation to consider our position in the cognitive landscape as we jump and while we’re falling. Kierkegaard’s true insight was that genuineness comes not from being so absolutely sure that we don’t consider the possibility of us being wrong, but rather from being sure while granting that we could be wrong. That uncertainty–that recognition that, though we leap with all we are, we could be wrong–is what separates the humanity within us from the mere machines that we use in our lives.

Imagine the world in which, for any emotional heartache, there’s one and only one song that soothes it; for every scrape, there’s a particular bandaid and a particular way to apply that bandaid; for every desire, there’s one and only way know to fulfill it; one way to express an idea as complicated and important as love.

For my lot, I’ll take the world of experimentation, of trial and error, of my own way to show the Wife that I love her. So, don’t I ever get tired of dealing with stuff that doesn’t have answers? Sometimes, but, at the end of the day, I’d rather live in a world like our own that leaves the important stuff open than a world in which we all have the answers.

(The philosopher in me is cringing at the opaqueness of this post. It needs tightened, streamlined, and linked together better. This one comes more from the poet in me. Begone, you philosophical spectre!)

In a comment on a comment that I had for Dave at www.davidseah.com, Yombo said:

“I may also ditch the acoustic and go with electric until my fingers can keep up.”

Just wanted to write real quick that there are a few options one can do to make playing the acoustic guitar easier. I’ll try to keep them ranked in order of how easy the fix will be:

1) Try to spend a few minutes every day giving firm pinches on the guitar after you’ve played for the day. Before you go to bed, focus on fingerwork, and only fingerwork, with no sound or playing. The key here is just to fatigue your fingers in order to strengthen them.

The drawback here is that it’s not fun and your fingers are already tired.

Cost to try: $0 and an additional 5-10 minutes every couple of days, depending on playing schedule.

2) Go to a lighter gauge string. Most acoustics start with Medium Guage strings, and the reason for this is two-fold: 1) they sound a lot more full, and 2) they work for most styles of musical playing. Switching to lighter strings, however, can make learning to play the guitar much easier since you’re not having to press so dang hard to get a good sound out of them. This is especially the case if you’re at the point where you’re trying to learn barre chords.

This option is a trade-off. What you lose here is the deeper, richer sound that medium strings provide as well as the increased finger-strength and dexterity that comes with playing more resilient strings; lighter strings also have a tendency to break more so you may be replacing them more often. What you gain is hands that are less sore and perhaps the ability to make it through a few more songs, or parts of a song, if you’re still learning. Try it out before you spend more money buying another guitar.

Cost to try: $3-10, depending on the string. I prefer Martin Acoustic SPs.

3) Buy a hand exerciser and carry in a backpack or briefcase to use while you’re at work, riding on the train, standing in line, etc. Focus on pinching with the left hand in the following ways:

• The fingertip to thumbtip pinch (alternate with all fingers): helpful for strengthening fingers used for individual strings
• The flat-of-the-finger to flat-of-the-thumb pinch (alternate with the index, middle, and ring finger): helpful for bar chords.
• the full hand pinch: helpful for general hand strength and flexibility

(I had pictures of these movements, but the pictures got all SNAFU’ed; I may get them up later.)

I used a Nike gel type that I can’t currently find (I swear I saw it earlier). Besides occasionally smelling like foot (an indication that I’ve used it too much and it needs cleaning) and collecting the lint that travels to the bottom of the bag, there’s no drawbacks to this option. It’s also incredibly helpful having something to work on when you’re away from your guitar, and the ladies dig a man that can give massages and open jars without implements and counter tapping.

Cost to try: $5-20 dollars, depending on the type of hand exerciser.

4) Have your action “lowered” or “loosened.” Action loosely refers to the setup of the instrument and translates into how it’s played. There are many things that affect the action of the guitar, such as:
-Humidity
-Wear and Tear
-Factory Settings
-String Guage

What’s important to remember about playing an acoustic guitar is that you are playing an instrument that came from a unique tree, and therefore every acoustic guitar is slightly different. Factories, however, set actions at the same level, despite the uniqueness of the instrument. After a few months or years of playing, the uniqueness of the instrument sets in. Take your guitar to a reputable instrument repair shop and have it worked on and ask them to lower the action so that the guitar’s easier to play. They’ll know what you mean. On another note, if you’ve had your guitar a year or so, it’s probably time to have someone look at it anyways, as they do require regular maintenance and check-ups that’s beyond the capabilities of most beginning and intermediate players.

The main drawback to this option is the cost. If you’ve got an entry level guitar that you paid $75-150 for, it may be a bit too much to swallow to pay for the cost of the guitar again. This leads to a bad spiral: cheaper instruments require more maintenance, but the maintenance of those guitars cut into the bottom line. Another good reason to buy a bit higher quality guitar up front.

Cost to try: $40-100, depending on area and technician availability and costs.

I’ve personally done all of these things at different times and noticed an improvement in my playing, finger strength, and motivation. Give ‘em a try and let me know how it goes.

In his latest post on Ground Hog Day Resolutions, Dave wrote:

“Personally, there are some personal creative goals I’d like to pursue:

• Play an instrument / Play one song well
• Compose a song with an interesting arrangement”

I recently had an experience with this arena and would like to share it.

Background: I love playing and learning about music, even though I’m not very good at it; I’ve played the acoustic guitar now for about 8 years, and I’ve been playing far too long to not be better than I am. The chief obstacle to my musical progress has really been other habits that made it such that there hasn’t been much time to play and I really hadn’t felt the motivation to change those habits. While visiting some friends over the holidays, I played Rock Band. Now, I played the drums, and it was only on easy and medium, but I had more fun playing than I had in a long time. I mean, a long, long time. But there were two facets of the experience that were the most salient to me: 1) I loved playing the drums and 2) I loved playing with someone else.

I went down to the nearest Guitar Center soon afterwards and played an electric drum set there (I think it was the Roland Tour). After a few hours of playing (yes, I stayed there that long), I bought the more economical (read: cheaper) Yamaha DTX Exporer, as well as some other audio recording stuff (the audio recording stuff will be covered later so as to keep this entry and response manageable).

I took the drum set home, set it up, and went to town. I had the fun feeling of seeing myself improve every time I played, but something was missing. Wisely, I kept a journal of how I felt after playing, and it boiled down to me not liking the sound of the bass drum and not liking the “feel” of the set. Now, I’m not a drummer, but I am enough of a musician to know that there’s a somewhat intangible feel that goes with playing instrument; it’s hard to describe, but you’re either in the Flow or you’re not. And with this set, I wasn’t in the Flow.

I wound up taking the drum set back to the Guitar Center. But, while I was there, I played the same drum set that I originally played, and felt inspired again. I also went to an acoustic drum set and felt WAY more inspired. I actually wanted to play the drums again. Given that acoustic drum sets are LOUD and require a bit more space, I did not purchase that drum set, although I could have for about the same price as the drum set I had returned.

Hang in there, as there’s a little more background. Given that I bought a lot of equipment on my initial visit, I had some store credit that I was looking to spend (sidebar: I can still have that store credit returned to my Guitar Center card, but the store credit is still covered under the 0%, 12 month financing; if I have it returned to the card, then, if I want some music gear later in the year, I’ll have to pay for it right then or get the 3 months financing. It’s a better deal for me to hold it for now). I’ve toyed for years about whether I want to get an electric guitar, so I played some in the store. What has kept me from doing it in the past is 1) I don’t like buying entry level gear and getting into an intermediate level set for an electric guitar costs anywhere from $500-800 and 2) I’ve never felt the same inspiration from playing one that I do from playing the acoustic guitar. I also have been tooling around on keyboards for a while and am more inspired by them than an electric guitar. I declined on getting the electric guitar again for both reasons; in short, I wasn’t inspired by playing them.

Okay, we’re all done with the background. If you’re serious about wanting to play an instrument, here’s what I’d recommend you to do:

1. Review your music collection to see what type of music you find to be the most “you” of the collection. This may be hard to do, but think about what music inspires the creative spark in you. Or, alternatively, think about what types of music places you in the mental/emotional state that you want to be in.
   • From this, you’ll probably find that a few instruments stand out from these trends.
2. Consider accessibility when learning an instrument for the first time. What follows is a discussion of popular instrument choices:
   • Six-string guitars: Here you have two basic choices: acoustic or electric.
     • Electric guitars tend to be easier to learn than acoustic, mostly due to the fact that acoustic guitars require more finger strength to play correctly and that can be daunting and frustrating up front. Electric guitars are also a bit more versatile if you get a good one.
     • Acoustic guitars are a bit harder to learn but are a bit cheaper to get a good intermediate level guitar. However, the tonal qualities of an acoustic are what inspires a lot of people. There’s also a bit more of a connection between the wood instrument and how much the way it sounds depends on you and your connection to the guitar. Lastly, a good acoustic guitar matures with you as you play it and develop its own unique sound. (Disclaimer: I’m partial to acoustic guitars)
   • Bass guitars: Most people choose to start with an electric bass guitar even though acoustic basses are available. Bass guitars are easier to learn than six-string guitars, but are every bit as difficult to master. Bass guitarist have to have a good feel for rhythm, as your role in a musical setting is to keep the song in rhythm and moving along. It is on your foundation that the rhythm and lead (six-string) guitars get to do their playing, for you provide the musical anchor necessary to keep the song full.
     • Keep in mind that some people find playing the bass by themselves boring, as it doesn’t make a great instrument to learn by yourself. If you buy a bass guitar, make sure you have a way to play the music you listen to loud and clear enough that you can play along with it and hear if you’re playing it correctly; most good bass amps have a line-in port that you can hook your iPod to play along with.
   • Drums: Drums can be incredibly fun to play for some people, but it suffers from many of the same drawbacks as the Bass guitar:
     1. Unless you really just love grooving on drums, you may not like playing them by yourself.
     2. An acoustic drum set is loud and takes a lot of space; they’re hard to play at a comfortable level in an apartment building without running afoul of your neighbors.
     3. A good drum set can be a bit expensive to get into.
     • Many people are now going to electric drum sets to get around the loudness and space factors, but 1) a good drum set is expensive and 2) though you can play all types of sounds, the range of sounds per drum/device and emotional expressiveness of an acoustic drum set is lost. For instance, the velocity, angle, and tension with which you hit a high-hat on an acoustic drumset is critical–and drummers spend a lot of time finding exactly that position; that’s a bit lost in an electric drum set, though some of the high end electric drum sets can process and output those different variations.
   • Keyboards: The range of keyboard quality is phenomenal, and a good keyboard (with hammer weighted keys) can have much the same feel as a piano. Furthermore, they are quite versatile instruments and can be used in nearly any music setting. The coordination of the hands for playing makes improving a challenge, but learning to play a cultural staple well provides many opportunities and benefits for a keyboard musician. Also keep in mind that the learning curve for playing the keyboard/piano is a bit more steep due to its sheet music being more complex. However, if you learn to read music for piano, you can very easily pickup the musical notation for all of the other instruments.
3. When you consider buying an instrument, I highly recommend you buy an intermediate level instrument. We naturally think that we don’t want to spend a lot of money for something we may not enjoy, but the quality of an instrument makes a huge difference. First, if you have an instrument that sounds awesome and you really love it, you’re more likely to play it. Second, there comes a point with entry level instruments in which you outgrow it; this can be due to sound, features, or a whole slew of other factors individual to the instrument. Having an instrument whose quality is low can plateau your playing and those stifle your musical development. Third, entry level instruments do not age very well, and, for acoustic instruments, do not mature as they are played. That said, you’ll probably need to budget the following per instrument:
   • Acoustic guitars: $450-600.
   • Electric guitars: $350-700 for the instrument, $150-300 for the amp and necessary hardware
   • Drumsets: $800-1000 for the drums, hardware, and cymbals.
   • Keyboards: $450-800, depending on what individual options you need.
4. Going along with the last recommendation, play the intermediate and above level instruments. This may seem daunting, because you may not know what you’re looking for, but the main thing you’re looking for is how the instrument sounds. If possible, have the people at the store do some playing for you so that you can hear what it sounds like in the hands of a competent musician. Plan for an afternoon so that you can play a lot of different instruments, or hear them played. GO WITH WHAT INSPIRES YOU; you’ll feel it. Some quick notes per instrument type:
   • Acoustic Guitars: Try Taylors and Martins. They each sound a bit different; my ear registers Taylors as bright and Martins as deep and full. I prefer Martins, but that’s due to my playing style.
   • Electric Guitars: Try the Fender Stratocasters and Gibson Les Pauls. Strats are used in a lot of rock applications and register to my ear as brighter and crisper; Les Pauls are used in rock applications, as well, but are also used much more in jazz and blues applications–they sound warmer to me.
   • Bass Guitars: Ibanez produces many popular bass guitars. Try their jazz version.
   • Drum sets: Look at Ludwig, Pearls, and Tamas. Don’t be shy in the drum room and give the instruments a good tap and thump; you need to hear how the drums sound and how they feel. Texture and sound are really, really important.
   • Keyboards: Yamaha is the brand to look to for keyboards in the intermediate range. See whether you would rather have a keyboard with less, but more accurate and full, sounds or whether you want to go with one that has a ton of sounds that aren’t quite as accurate and full. See whether you’d like to have keyboard or weighted keys.
5. If you buy from a chain store, such as Guitar Center, they may offer you a certain amount of time to play and return the instrument if you don’t like it. Guitar Center gives 60 days if you get a Performance Guarantee with the instrument; I recommend the PG anyways, but having an extra 30 days to try the equipment is nice. Get the equipment, go home, and try it, but don’t get committed to keeping it until you find yourself enjoying it; if you don’t enjoy it, TAKE IT BACK!! Identify, if you can, what you didn’t like, and get something else, and try it for 60 days. Rinse and repeat until you find something you like or exhaust your options; in which case, get your money back and check it off the list.
6. Keep in mind that learning an instrument for the first time requires work and practice!! You will likely not be good at first, but keep at it, and you’ll recognize yourself getting better slowly. if you have the right instrument, you should enjoy the learning process even though you recognize that you could be better. Stick with it. Practice/play every day for fifteen minutes rather than trying to sit down for hours. As with any new habit/process, make it a part of your daily routine.

I hope this has been helpful, and if you have any questions, please let me know.

I’ve fallen off of blogging for a long (long) time for primary reason that I spent way too much time in front of the computer and not enough time doing things that I enjoy much more.

Reasons I stopped blogging:

• Too much time in front of computer
• Not enough time to write about what I wanted to write about
• Having a hard time taking myself and my project seriously–why should anybody read what I’ve been writing?
• Focused probably too much on making money from it rather than just enjoying writing
• Having far too many things to write about and trying to keep blog focused
• Fussy computer software that I spent more time fighting and fussing with than actually writing–never found a good solution that allowed the muse to pour out

Some things have changed here recently that perhaps may change what I do:

1. I need to focus on writing, which is part of what made me pick up blogging in general. My original goal was just to write something everyday, and I thought that working on that would make is such that I would work on the writing I should be working on. Here lately I’ve been focusing more on just writing something everyday, and, voila, I’m now more keen on writing.
2. I’ve been reading more of Dave Seah’s blog. I’ve thought about responding to some of his posts individually, and I thought, why not just make the post available for everyone?
3. I’ve still had a hard time taking myself seriously, and I think, in retrospect, that I was relating taking myself seriously with making money off of the blog. Why should someone read and play for what I’m writing? At this point, I’m not focused on making money (I’ve already paid for the service, and I don’t like using blogspot for some reason; not sure why, but why fight it when I’ve already paid for the service?). The writing is for me (see point 1 above) and for those that may be interested already. I’ve changed from writing for everybody to writing for me and people I’m responding to.
4. I’m thinking of just changing the blog to just be able to write about whatever I feel like. If I can’t glue it all together, tough. I’d rather let the muses run than try to keep them corralled in a particular pen with a price tag.
5. I’m not really fighting with software anymore. I’ve gotten rather good at using Textmate (broke down and bought it) for rough writing and then dropping the product in whatever end software that’s relevant to what I’m doing. Since I can brainstorm better in Textmate, it let’s the muses run, and I can focus on polish later.

The meta-change that summarizes all of those is just a change in perspective. Rather than trying to monetize, advertise, and so on, I’m just writing and letting the rest happen. Should things need to change, then so be it. For now, it’s write for me and a few others, share with others, and be flexible. Let’s see if the rest falls into place.