Saraah!

Some tabs available in the internet are misleading and oftentimes inaccurate. I don’t think they use standard tuning. I can actually dispense with a digital reader or a tuning fork to set my strings to standard, as I’ve sort of mastered perfect pitch after almost half a year of practice. It’s not that hard. Actually it’s a lot of fun humming E and adjusting it therewith to hit the proper pitch.

It’s not fun though to find that the tabs online are either a half-step too high or dropped two steps lower. I used to follow the tabs to the letter which is bad practice even more so when it is wrong. I really thought I will never get any better because I couldn’t play the song the way I hear it. I spent a sum costumizing my guitar and buying different guitar models only to realize that it wasn’t my equipment that was the problem, it was the tabs.

Anyway, that’s part of the learning process I guess. There are actually good tabs in www.ultimate-guitar.com, the only good tab site in existence as the rest were shut down for infringement of copyrights. My advice is be careful with the tabs you’re using. If you can’t find one that would satisfy your personal playing standards, you should make your own. And that’s what I’m about to do with mottaka and uh, nowhere fast.

I am a lefty but I was forced to take down notes in class with my right hand last week. This has the least bit to do with the latest arm independence exercises I’ve to master in drumming. I blame this entirely on the stupid bass and electric guitars we’ve recently had lying around here.

One touch of the fretboard, one string pick, just that one little innocuous hammer-pull, I knew then that I was heading back to the music asylum I thought I’d left behind ages ago. Power chords, scales, arpeggios and such memories washed over me like silly. Seems it was only yesterday I swore off my talismanic attachment (read as: abnormal addiction) to strings.

I am totally hooked. The old kalyos I thought I had rid of for good are starting to form on my left hand. While there was only one big kalyo on the stem of my thumb from all the writing and drumming the past month, now I’m nursing four more. Sakit.

Being a lefty makes everything in music more painful especially when you have to write with the same hand that you use to form your chords. This is true. But it’s never too late to acquire ambidexterity. If getting back the old fighting form means sacrificing my writing left hand for music, then that’s just fine. I can’t even recall the last time I used my right for anything anyway. Might as well use it for writing, and that at least would lessen the ink stains on my shirt. Capisce? Capisce.

I went through everything I wrote in here, and FFS i write like there’s no tomorrow. Perhaps I’m overcompensating for the years I placed writing on indefinite hiatus. But I just can’t go into a writing rampage all of sudden and expect anyone to understand WTH I mean after almost three years of silence. Besides the fact that nobody’s really interested, the attention span of the average person does not even go beyond a minute. Okay. No more wall of text, no more exceeding the reading limit–it’s all keeping it simple from now on. Time’s up.