Sore fingers

Thursday, 27th March, 2008

Recently talking of things being “like riding a bike”, I also recently started playing my guitar again, as frequently as I did when I started to learn it years ago. I used to play every single day, for at least an hour, and quite often for longer. I built up a decent repertoire of songs that I played, and learned most of them off by heart (didn’t need the tabs).

I’ve never actually stopped playing, just that it had become a very infrequent activity, even though one of my guitars is constantly accessible as it sits on a stand in the corner of my living room. On the rare occasion when I did pick it up and play, it was a very small subset of the songs that I knew that I played on it.

Playing it much more frequently now means I need more things to play, as it gets very boring playing the same songs over and over again. So, I dug out the big box I have with all of the various tabs that I had collected years ago, and started to flick through them: cue lots of “oh aye, remember that one!”

What I find remarkable here though, is that just getting a reminder of a song that I used to play on the guitar (eg. Strong Enough by Sheryl Crow) and a quick look at the tab to see where it starts is enough. It just sort of comes back to me – my hand just moves from shape to shape without me even thinking about it. Songs that I haven’t played in six or seven years, played from start to finish without any bother.

Maybe my memory isn’t as bad as I thought it had become!

27

Mar

Sore fingers

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