Way Back When…

So, before the Thanos Snap of OD (which it shall now forever be known by), I had another outlet aside from this place. I’ve always been into the fine arts of sorts. All through school I sang. In elementary school because it was a class. Later years it was probably more of an easy A than a passion. I still enjoyed it but especially in high school, it was more of a “Yeah, I can do this. It’s not a hard grade. Just show up, participate, and don’t be a douche and you’re set.” I think a lot of us who participated in artistic classes (choir, band, drama) all had a glimmer of hope that maybe we could do this for a living in some way. I can remember while in show choir in Jr High, a group of us did a barbershop…quintet? Is that a thing? I don’t know. There were five of us guys, and we sang doo-wop songs, or some Elvis Presely. Aside from singing at the school concerts and our own show choir, erm, shows…we even did a show or two outside of it. One of which I still have the pamphlet from somewhere with me, (or it’s in storage…) from the event. That was also during the dark ages of music…the boy band era…(yeah, I said it. Fight me.) So I think we, again, secretly wanted something more to come out of it. Then life comes along and just says, “Nope, that is not your path. Follow me here.” And a majority go off to college. Some just go straight to work. I…joined the military. So I kind of did both. (You earn credits towards an associate’s in Basic Training and Tech School..so, it counts. Right?)

But one thing I always did maintain since my high school days was playing guitar. I played a lot. I learned a lot. All self taught from a computer screen, looking at songs I knew, and learning tablature playing a long. And I did that for quite a while never really branching out and trying my own thing, mostly because I never learned any kind of music theory and never took lessons so I didn’t practice the things I would have, had I hired someone to provide lessons. But I managed. I played well enough for me. Never played in front of, say, more than 5-6 people at any given time. But I didn’t care.

And then…the internet happened. Well, it happened long ago, but advances were coming. MySpace was still a thing and someone posted this small clip of a video they recorded themselves lip-syncing to a song and embedded a video from this small little website called…YouPo…no, umm, YouTube. Yeah, YouTube. And I thought that’d be a great place to record stuff. I could make tutorials (no more than 5 minutes long at the time) instead of trying to do this audio recordings that sounded awful. These two concepts would eventually merge as at some point I stopped recording videos of me playing, and just went with audio recordings that I made videos of a black screen. I don’t know why but if I just record audio, I can play smoothly. When I try video, for some reason I would just mess up. I could start over again and just delete the video until it’s perfect but audio just worked better.

And I did a lot of them. I think I was in the 40’s a few years ago (number of videos, not my age…though I’m almost to the point of the 14th anniversary of my 21st birthday in a month and a half roughly) and generally got a positive response. I even named one after a fellow OD-er as I mentioned in my previous entry. But, passions fade. Interests change. At one point I had 5-6 guitars…now I have two. Only two. Well, three but it’s been warped and I can’t bring myself to get rid of it because I’ve had it since Valentine’s Day 2003. It’s my longest relationship. An inanimate object. My life. And I want to do other things. But, those other things just took me a long time to get to. But I’m there.

Currently anyway. Though I’m in a lull now with this hobby/venture/thing I’ve been paid for once, thing I am doing. And I think I enjoy it more than I think I ever have playing guitar. Maybe I’ve put more effort into this in the last ~3 years than I have in almost 20 years of guitar playing which is why I enjoy it. I watch hours, upon hours of videos every week on this and I don’t get bored. There’s always something to learn. There’s inspiration of ways to do things that are much easier to do if you want unlike the vastly more technical complexities of a musical instrument…to a point. There’s still so much to learn, but I really enjoy it. And I hope to keep doing it for a long time.  And I really hope to really get a generous feel of the new one I bought in December that I haven’t taken advantage of how I should so far. But, the weather here sucks. And I work too much at times. But those are lazy excuses.

I’ll just leave these here.

It’s photography. I’m talking about photography.