Done Before I Started…

Regarding the title of the last blog “Two Scoops of Raisins”…if you feel the need to understand what that means, ask Clay or Michael. I have no clue, even though it’s been explained to me three times. I was sitting in the room when they did it, and I totally missed the joke. Anyway, it all sounds the same to me.

I want to say again how much I enjoyed my weekend with Ed and Becky. It was a lot of fun, in spite of the noise.

Well, I had my first bass lesson last night. I dislike reporting that by my estimation, it didn’t go well. The more Michael talked, the more I got confused. There is only one thing I’m sure of at this point – I had the sense that I didn’t know anything about music; now I’m 100% certain of it.

We took the bass into the office and locked the door. The door wasn’t locked for the normal reasons, but just on the off chance that someone opened the door it would cause damage. We spent 15 minutes adjusting the bottom thingy to get the height right for me – Michael is in denial that I am as tall as he is, and he insisted that the height needed to be adjusted for me. In the end, it’s back where it started.

Next, I had a revisit of learning the alphabet. Along with learning about chords A through G…actually, I remember something about E A D G, and I’m to come up with an acronym to help me remember them. I don’t know if A through G are the chords, or what they’re called. Then Michael proceeded to tell me that all stringed instruments have frets to help us determine where we are supposed to be and he demonstrated this on his Huber banjo, but then told me that the bass does not have frets and that I would have to guess. So, right off the go I’m in trouble.

We spent a considerable amount of time on the alphabet. Michael insisted that I would need to know it. All I kept thinking of is when I was a little girl my father would say “A B C the goldfish?” and I was supposed to reply “L M N O goldfish”, to which he would respond “ O S M R - C M P N”. This still cracks me up, by the way.

In the midst of the alphabet lesson a miracle occurred – the phone rang. I answered “Thank you for rescuing me!” The person on the other end, a stranger, was rather surprised and said that I must have been expecting a call from someone else. “Not at all” I replied, “Just really happy that someone called right now – it didn’t much matter who it was”. Unfortunately, the call ended and the lesson resumed.

By now I’m drawing lines on paper and putting letters across the lines and then numbering the letters 1 through 7. The point of this, I gather, is that when someone in a jam says "we’re in G”, I’m supposed to know that I’m to play a G string and then the D and back and forth. I think. I wouldn’t want to swear to that.

Next we got out the metronome so that I could get my timing polished up. Up to this point, I have not touched the bass other than the height check. I am feeling pretty discouraged as the lesson seems to be going not great. Usually through the course of a lesson we get clarity, but I was getting further away from clarity. The metronome was going TICK and I was supposed to DING at the same time, but my ding didn’t line up with it’s click only but a couple times…Michael kept saying ‘you’re off…you’re off’…you’re ahead of it…you’re off’. I would like to point out that you knew I had no sense of rhythm when we got married and it would seem that this has not improved at all in these years. So yes, I’m off.

Lemme see…I don’t know what the chords are supposed to sound like, I can't tell one from another when someone else is playing them, the alphabet stuff is as confusing as heck, there are no frets to guide me (a fact that I find fretful – I had to put that in here), my ding can't line up with the tick, the teaching videos put me right to sleep, and I’m fearful that I’m not going to be able to fake my way through this thing, plus the whole experience made my neck and right arm ache and apparently I had my thumb wrapped around the neck in the wrong fashion. Whatever. I’m very much aware of my shortcomings in this area.

On the positive…hmmmm….I did spend some time with Michael while we had the lesson, so that was nice. I found Michael’s explanation of the nut to be highly entertaining…the nut talking about the nut… " I absolutely mastered G D G D G D G D, D A D A D A D A, G D G D G D G D. Next, Cluck Old Hen. Move over, Barry Bales.

At the beginning of the lesson I was looking at the comments to Michael’s latest blog – a gentleman named Jack wrote something about the music all sounding the same…I hear you, Jack. After giving this some thought though, I have the feeling that Jack was taking a poke at me…I bet you don’t think it all sounds the same do you, Jack? Oh, and by the way, Michael said he was only able to practice for three hours because I was out – don’t you believe that horse poop. He can practice as much as he wants when I’m home, as soon as he’s done his chores.

This is the most I’ve written about music. It’s going to take me a while to recover from this experience.

Have a happy and blessed day.
Helen