Loving Music

So it’s weird. When I was about 19 years old, I picked up my first guitar, which at the time was a Fender Strat electric. Surprisingly, I didn’t really know how to play, but it was something I was always interested in doing so my mom surprised me and picked me up a guitar.

I spent the next few years pissing my roommates off by walking around my dorm room playing Green Day and whatever else was popular at the time. When I hit the age of about 25, I sort of just gave music up completely, probably because I didn’t really have much time and I wasn’t really making much progress.

About two weeks ago, I picked up a guitar for the first time in years, and it actually felt really good to play again. I’ve spent most evenings since then playing as much guitar as I can (my fingers aren’t used to it anymore, so I’m having to rebuild callouses on my fingertips to be able to play – it’s painful right now).

Since everyone seems to be using Garageband these days, I’ve also been dabbling in that. I figured something out tonight that should save me a lot of time. I used to record the entire guitar track all at once for a song, but that would take a long time and if you made one mistake, you’d have to redo the whole thing. Now I’ve figured out how to record small sections and loop them together. Probably not great for an actual recording, but it works well enough for quick takes of things.

Tonight I sat down with the intent to try and create a song in Garageband from scratch, basically just for the learning experience. I didn’t really have any ideas when I sat down, but I just sort of picked a key and started strumming. It’s nowhere near done, but I sort of like it so far. I haven’t come up with the ending yet or finished the lyrics, but it’s sort of falling together. Or I might just give up on it, who knows. You can sort of see the obvious gaps where lyrics should go, although there are some fills missing.

I only have a crappy USB mic at home, so I can’t really record anything that great. Also, my acoustic is a hunk of garbage that vibrates weird. I wouldn’t mind throwing some piano parts in a few places, but it’s just too time consuming using the keyboard to do the notes. Tom Lee has a pretty cheap USB keyboard that does MIDI, so I was thinking about maybe picking that up in the near future and testing it out. I’ll probably mess around with this some more on the weekend if I have some time.