I'm A Terrible Musician

Once upon a time, not long ago, when people wore pajamas and lived life slow, I played the bass guitar. Not very well, mind you, but I still played it, dammit. I'd played mostly the lines to songs I knew which tended to be incredibly easy. I improved slightly when I joined the jazz band in college and discovered that "Hey! I can't read music." That worked sort of well for a while. I still wasn't terribly good, but learned enough to play the accompaniment to alto sax in the intro of 'Round Midnight in a dining room in Erie, so I considered it a success. I haven't been playing much recently. Part of it is that I don't plan my time out very well and end up playing NHL06 instead, but a larger part is that I don't have anyone to play with recently, and playing bass unaccompanied by any other instrumens is fine if you're Vic Wooten, but not so much if you're mortal.

I have thought in the past that the solution to this would be to either find someone that plays another instrument (a difficult prospect for a graduate student) or learn how to play guitar. That's been kind of on hold for a while because, in addition to not actually having a guitar yet, the whole "playing more than one note at once" thing kind of eludes me. That's where this comes in. I'm not exactly sure how "Guitar Hero for an actual guitar" would work, as the easier settings on Guitar Hero are made easier by skipping long passages, which doesn't really work if you actually want to play a song. Still, it's an idea that intrigues me. I'm a big fan of the Guitar Hero franchise, don't buy into the whole "stop playing this and start playing a real guitar" thing in general because the point of a video game is not to delude the user into thinking they're actually acquiring a skill other than "playing the game", and because people who whine about that somehow don't say the same thing of, say, people who play Madden but don't actually play professional football.

So yes. Perhaps this level of "slow down there, cowboy, and we'll show you how to play a guitar" tutorial will motivate me to actually pick one up and learn. Or maybe I'll take up basketweaving.

One of those two.