Learning to play

As well as being an enthusiastic fan of listening to music and writing CD reviews and Musician interviews, I occasionally play an instrument myself. I do not play professionally, but I can create a tune and some words to go with it if presented with an acoustic guitar or a piano keyboard.

During my childhood, I wished to learn to play the guitar. However, my parents did not buy me one until after I had left the school which offered beginner's classes. I was eventually given a guitar one Christmas and it came with an instruction book. Sitting on the floor of my bedroom trying to play a D or G chord was very boring and I soon decided just to make nice noises and just pretend I could play.

It was not until my early twenties that I actually began to learn to play a guitar. At the time, I had just married a man who was to become my tormentor in the future. For the first few months after the ceremony, he would depart from our room share accommodation for one or two hours each evening in order to dine with his mother, leaving me to eat alone. Whilst waiting for him to return, I would borrow his guitar and Beatles book. Copying the fingering for some of the chords that were written in the back of the book, I began to learn to play.

I had soon built up a repertoire of a dozen or so chords. I then progressed into using these to accompany myself on short ballads that I had created. I built up a collection of around thirty songs, most of which detailed my misery within the relationship, my dissatisfaction with life, my adorations of a singer who lived in the USA, and other matters I was encountering at the time.

Once I had my own songs established, I did not bother copying any new chords from the Beatles music book. Chords such as B or C made my fingers ache for example. On occasion, I would still open the book, and subsequently fail as I tried to play along with a song. The only song I ever managed to master using this method was Get Back. I had never heard it professionally, so I did not know if my guitar playing sounded right or not. When I finally had the opportunity to hear the song by the Beatles themselves, I was more curious as to whether I had sounded correct or not, than about their performance. Now, whenever I hear this song, I always recall those first clumsy chords on my ex's guitar.