Tags
circle of fifths, dad, flowers, guitar, guitar player, hayfield, lessons, Music, music theory, notes, summer, yucca plants
Hello, handful of people who read this blog.
You will be glad to know that I am not dead– not that I know of, anyway. Just busy trying to somewhat gracefully survive another Arkansas summer. Boy, I wonder where spring got off to? One second I’m in love with the shy advances of temperamental April weather, the next I’m being sat upon and suffocated by the irrationally high humidity levels. “Getting…. hard, to… breathe!”
In the meantime, us Arkansans have been doing typical June things. That means bailing hay, restoring the coolant in our pickups, dragging out all the window fans, bailing more hay, and watching the yucca plants bloom.
Haha. Did you catch that? An Arkansan watching a yucca plant bloom? Whatever.
They are in bloom, but down here we wouldn’t be caught dead enjoying something as sissy-sounding as a “yucca plant”. So we just call ‘em bear grass. Takes care of all our problems.
FYI: This post is not about yucca plants or bear grass.
It’s about the fact that my dad is trying to learn acoustic guitar. Isn’t that cool? I’ve been taking classes for about nine weeks now, and he never showed any vested interesting in picking it up himself until I came home with the ability to play the intro to “Walk The Line” by Johnny Cash.
You know (if you don’t, get the heck off my Internet) in the beginning of the song where the bass player does the “walkup” and Johnny is humming before he actually starts to sing? That’s the part I was playing when Dad fell in love. He said, and I quote; “Meggie May, if I could learn to just play that much on a guitar, I’d sit around and do it all day!” The sad part? He wasn’t kidding.
So, not realizing the potential damage I could be doing, I decided I would take the time to teach him a few things last Saturday on my acoustic. I figured Hey, what’s the harm? It will be cute– like when you train your pet to do something clever! So I sat him down on the couch and, being very eager to learn how Johnny gets his guitar to make that cool sound, he listened astutely as I explained to him what was what and where he had to put his fingers.
Said intro to said song is played using notes, as shown here at the top of the page:
And though Dad doesn’t have any idea what the name of the notes are or where they fit in the grander scheme of things, he could play them with an impressive accuracy by the end of our first “lesson”. Sure, it’s only picking– but for a rank amateur, the man held his own.
He also gave me a new appreciation for my guitar teacher! It takes the patience of Job to not just teach someone, but to pretend you share their excitement when they discover something it seems like you’ve known since the beginning of time. Example: “WOW. Did you know that touching the other strings makes them sound all flat and stuff?” Oh my gosh… no WAY! My guitar teacher is underpaid.
Anyway, Dad must have gone through that walkup two hundred times. He was pretty proud of himself when he finally got to the point where he could do it with no mistakes. Of course, I was letting him look at his hands, and just to keep egos in check I showed him this:
It’s the Circle of Fifths, or the introduction to music theory. He gave it a good, long, hard look as I explained to him the finer points of tension and resolve, then he uncrossed his eyes and went back to playing his walkup. Heh heh. Just keeping it real here.
He’s getting himself a used guitar and expects me to continue his education. I wonder when I should tell him the average salary for guitar teachers around here is about $17 a lesson…
