Sources of Inspiration

Normally, when I'm not sick, I'll usually post a blog here on Fridays. I wasn't sick last Friday, but something unusual happened instead.
I was struck by I N S P I R A T I O N

So, as you might know, I've been learning how to play guitar recently. I'm very much taking it at my own pace and doing whatever I want when I feel like because, more often than not, I'll just get the urge to play music with my own hands and I'll grab what ever I have and do just that. However, eventually, I actually want to have a routine with this thing where I can just play whatever I want at tempo, and that requires real practice and learning the instrument. I've done enough music theory to know things and I've actually dabbled in making music with reaper and the like with a few tunes that I actually like. But when it comes to playing, I'm very weird about it.

I was trained to play euphonium (firefox still doesn't believe this is a real word) from 12 to 17 and I was in band and marching band in middle and high school. I liked to play with the band, even liked to practice on my own at times, but never felt like I actually wanted to do anything with the instrument I chose to learn. Originally, I wanted to learn trumpet but was steered away from that, and then violin when orchestra was added to my middle school's curriculum and none of my friends wanted to change to orchestra with me, and I regret not doing it anyway to this day. Mostly, I still think I would love to learn violin, but those things are actually very expensive, and if I had actually started learning back at 13, I would be very good at it these days. I tried to learn trumpet, and my parents bought me one of those, but I actually have a physical deformity in my lips thanks to an ice hockey incident when I was young, and I never could play it very well.

I played with the band and then took trumpet lessons in college and even played in the jazz band, but every time, I was shuffled back into euphonium because, as it turns out, I wasn't half bad at that, and I was at trumpet. Discouraging doesn't even begin to describe it, so I stopped lessons and jazz band after about a year. It wasn't that I hated the euphonium or anything, it's just that I wanted to play the melody. I'd always wanted to play the melody, and I liked nothing more than having moving parts in whatever I played. But what does the euphonium do? It contributes to the bass. More often than not, the bass doesn't get the melody because musical reasons, so I liked etudes and things that let me play the melody.

So, forward to the future, after I'm out of college out of a job, and stuck at my parents house working for fedex, I come across this guy advertising for Kala's U bass. I loved the song he made and the sound of the bass, so I bought one. I wanted to learn how to play this, but never got very far. I didn't want to learn bass lines or anything like that of course, I wanted to do melody stuff and chords, which is not what a bass is for generally. All the tips and how to learn stuff was never what I wanted, so it mostly sat under my desk and got played for a few minutes once in a blue moon. I wanted to play piano, but to actually learn, I wanted lessons and just didn't have the time or money to commit to that. We had an electric piano at home and I could've bought one, but I simply never did.

Now, to current times, the most unusual thing about having bought the guitar is that I actually still pick it up to play every couple days. It's not a daily thing of course, I don't always have the time or energy to do that, but I bought the thing back in January, and I've played it twice a week, every week, since. I actually feel like I'm improving, which is the scary part. Following this, I recently found another song I wanted to learn, but felt like I needed some more fundamentals or a proper warm up routine. I looked around and found a bunch of theory videos, but nothing that ever really did it for me. I did, however, find something that was familiar to me, but I couldn't place what it was. Annoyed and tired, I went to bed.

The next morning, it was clear to me. I wanted to learn Hallelujah, which was written by Leonard Cohen, but John Cale's version is the one that I've settled on for now. I have a very strange issue where I feel like there's another version out there which I remember using a guitar as the main instrument, but I have yet to find it. either way, I listened to the song, learned the first set of movements and all the sudden, I knew exactly where I was going in Star Overhead. Why are these related? I know why, but you'd have to be caught up on the story to know, and that requires buying my books and all that, but the basic story here is that, for a while, I'd been putting working on this off. I was stuck on a part that I really needed to get though because the book needed this piece filled to advance the plot, but I couldn't figure out how to go from there. There's only so much I can force, so to help myself out and pursue a different idea I'd been toying with, I'd been working on a new story the day before. Now, I was laser focused on Star Overhead and I ended up using all my free time at school to work on the story. I made pretty good progress and did some research for the story at the same time.

The TL;DR comes down to this: Inspiration is a strange creature that strikes when you least expect it. Star overhead is of course about dealing with personal growth, family issues, magic and music, and in this round about way, my own journey with music brought me back to the story. So if you ever feel stuck on one creative pursuit, it might be a good idea to turn your attention to an entirely different one. You never know what it might spark.

Anyways, that’s all from me
Until next time~
-KCZ