Musical Interlude #1

Autobiographical nonsense follows – warning issued.

Background: We Moores are a semi-musical family, as in: Elder Daughter has a music degree (voice) and plays violin and piano; Younger Daughter plays piano, guitar and ukulele and sings – she’s that modern ‘there’s a YouTube showing me anything I don’t understand’ generation, so few formal lessons; Caboose is a bit of a phenom on fiddle (meaning: he’s remarkably good for how little he practices – sigh. But he just turned 13, so there’s plenty of time). I torture both musical instruments and my audiences (those unwilling to chew off their own limbs to escape) with piano, guitar and singing.

This leaves Middle Son, 20 at the time, who showed little interest in music until, suddenly, he decided he wanted to play guitar after hearing some Rodrigo y Gabriela. He wanted to learn this song:

Here’s where the dad stuff gets a little challenging:  I certainly want to encourage him, but this is piece is just short of insane – It would take a good guitarist – better than me, for sure – months to get this down. And that’s just Rodrigo’s part. What Gabby is doing on the rhythm guitar, with the complex stums, strikes, and pops at breakneck speed is just nuts – she’s done ‘how to’ videos (see: ‘there’s a YouTube showing me anything I don’t understand’ above) and, even slowed way down, even after multiple viewings, I don’t understand what she’s doing. ‘Understand’ and ‘can do’ being separated by a wide gulf.

Yet, this is the piece my son wants to *start* with. Not House of Rising Sun, or Good Lovin’ or Louie, Louie or any one of a bazillion 3-chord rock/pop songs that kids back in my day started on. Nope – straight on to graduate school without picking up the Bachelor’s first.

Soooo, what the heck. We get him a cheap guitar (nylon string with the cutaway – because that’s what Rodrigo & Gabby play) and I sit down and watch videos with him and figure little snippets out on my own, and we work on it.

And he’s smiling from ear to ear and playing until his fingers, while not bleeding, are very very sore.  A year later, he can in fact play Rodrigo’s part – not to speed, not quite in rhythm, but he’s got all the fingerings and notes.

And still grinning ear to ear. Amazing.

So: when we got his first guitar, we went down to Guitar Center (because, you know what? They have a LOT of guitars). I played a bunch and showed him the differences, tried to describe tone, action, intonation and so on. He nodded along. We picked a nice cheap guitar. Perfectly playable, decent tone, nice intonation, looks nice. What else do you want in a first guitar? Thomas was thrilled.

Sheer luck had Rodrigo Y Gabriela playing up in Napa a few week’s later, and, total fanboy waits over an hour (with me cooling my jets in the car) to meet them and maybe get his guitar signed. Which they very kindly do. Which creates problems: do you play the signed guitar and risk slowly erasing the signatures? Or do you do what collector’s do, and hang it on the wall?

Thomas feels guilty. He just got the guitar, he doesn’t want to turn it into a decoration. Yet, he soon discovers he is in fact slowly erasing Rodrigo’s signature – Gabby’s is more out of the way. After a year, Rodrigo is half-gone.

This weekend, down at TAC visiting him, we make a run to the local Guitar Center. He has hopes of maybe using a pick guard to shield what’s left of Rodrigo’s signature. While he’s looking into that, the Caboose and I head over to the guitars.

I play my way through the offerings, starting with the not-quite-so-cheap ones and working my way up. By the time Thomas joins us, I was up to the $700 guitars – very nice. So, I hand him the one step up from his guitar, describe it and tell him to play in. Not much reaction. Then I hand him the $700 guitar. He later admitted he had no idea what I was talking about regarding tone and playability and all that when we’d got his first guitar, but now, after a year and hundreds of hours of playing, he understands. So that $700 guitar sounded and played A LOT nicer. He go it.

Finally, the nicest cut-away nylon string they had was this beauty:

I played it for a minute. I lusted in my heart. Plays and sounds fabulous. Handed it to Thomas to check out.

Thomas could not get enough. For the next half hour,  he played through everything he knew at least twice(1). Then he asked me to play with him. Seizing the opportunity, grabbed a $1k Taylor dreadnought off the wall, and we jammed a little. (I’ve never bought a guitar anywhere near that expensive – I’m a hack and I know it, not dropping serious cash on a toy.)  The ear to ear smile never left his face.

Now Thomas wants that guitar bad. But he’s been raised well enough that that level of impulse buy isn’t happening. And he’s going to college at the moment. Maybe for his birthday, which is in November, we can pool some family resources and swing this for him. And that way cool signed guitar car retire to the wall.

1. The help at Guitar Center were pretty cool – they asked how we were doing a couple times, otherwise left us alone to play with their expensive toys.