Any Musicians On The Forum?

[hbelkins]

I never could master the flute, though. For some reason I wasn't able to get my mouth over the mouthpiece properly to direct the air into the instrument. So there went my scholastic dreams of being Walter Parazaider.

You're in the Kentucky boonies.  You should have joined a jug band instead.

During a talent show when I was either a senior or junior in high school, I was in a novelty band that we called The Skillet Lickers. There were some actual musicians in that group playing guitar, banjo, bass, etc. But for comic effect, we added a jug player (a friend of mine) and a wash tub bass player/singer (me). We dressed in hillbilly garb and played two songs -- "Bile That Cabbage Down" and "Dead Skunk In The Middle of the Road."

We got a few laughs, but we didn't win. Which was a shame, because the actual singers and musicians were pretty good.

[kurumi]

Or bluegrass. Lotta good music out there (hidden among the bad, like everything else). There's a country musician named Roy Clark (old folks might remember him from a show called Hee Haw) born in Never-heard-of-the-place, Virginia, who guest starred on an old sitcom called The Odd Couple with an acoustic guitar, and... that guy can play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xssnp7R51A

[hbelkins]

Roy Clark was very talented.

[Rothman]

There's a better version of him playing it -- I believe on Hee Haw itself -- out there on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/lxDQQDF6j0Y

[Mr_Northside]

The piano lessons I took as a kid mostly didn't stick.   Ended up doing percussion - drums in the "electric" bands I'm in / been in, and washboard & tambourine in our old-time acoustic group.

[bugo]

Roy Clark moved to Tulsa in the mid-1970s and lived there until his death. I didn't move to Tulsa until 2007, and I never saw him, but word is that he could often be seen out and about. He was certainly talented. He was a "shredder" before it was cool.

[kphoger]

I play the drums in church every Sunday.

Also, I know how to play other percussion (pretty well, depending on the instrument), piano (decently well), handbells (decently well), acoustic guitar (halfway well), and recorder (mediocre).  Besides that, I know how to sing, arrange choir music, and compose my own music (especially on piano).  In school, I won the annual Kansas statewide piano composition contest twice.

Having said all of that, I personally think the drum set is my best instrument.  It's the only one I at which I feel a natural skill, a freedom to play and improvise without having to think about it.  I hardly ever play piano anymore, for example, except for small projects now and then.

When I was graduating high school, everyone I knew assumed I would go to college for music and become some great musician.  However, I decided I didn't want music to become just a job.  I'd rather have it be a hobby than a career, lest I lose the joy of it.  So I didn't go into music.

Well, I guess I can add bass guitar to my list...

Yesterday, our regular bass player was out of town to shop for a new work van.  We only have one substitute on bass, lead guitar, or drums–and he was out of town as well.  But we just recently started rotating some folks from the youth department into rehearsals, including two who play drums.  And so, a week ago, the band leader texted me to ask if I'd rather (1) play drums and have no bass player at all, or else (2) fill in on bass and let the guy from the youth department have his first Sunday behind the drums on short notice.

Well, I never like doing without bass guitar, so I said I'd try to fill in on that.  Problem:  I'd only ever played bass guitar once before, and that was more than twenty years ago, back in high school.

So my total time to learn five songs:  30 minutes at the end of Wednesday's rehearsal, a couple of hours on Saturday when I went up to church by myself to practice, and about an hour between Sunday morning rehearsal and the worship service.  Roughly 3½ hours.

I must have done decently well, because the lead guitarist's wife just texted to say we sounded the best out of all the times the bassist was gone.  I figure that's pretty high praise, considering it means it sounded better than it does when our regular substitute fills in.  My biggest issue was that I played fairly quietly.  The guys behind the sound board had my channel cranked all the way up, and it was still kind of quiet.  The reason is that, without being comfortable on the instrument, playing loudly greatly increases the chance that I'll (a) pluck the wrong string or (b) not mute strings that need to be muted.

That experience was a bit nerve-racking.  I could hardly ever take my eyes away from the sheet music because I can't play by ear, and I spent a lot of time looking at the fretboard.  Also, my shoulder is still sore:  I never really appreciated the difference in weight between an acoustic and a solid-body guitar before.

[Scott5114]

The thing that always really gets me about bass (I have one but have never managed to practice enough to be confident playing for anyone but myself) is just how much force it takes to press those huge strings against the frets firmly enough to keep them from buzzing. I got a ukulele for my birthday this year and it feels like they come from totally different planets.

I have a different problem with the ukulele–the fretboard is so tiny I have trouble getting all of my fingers in the right place without them crowding into one another on certain chords.

[kphoger]

Yeah, my shoulder isn't the only thing that was sore.  My left wrist was too, from the force required to play.