I play guitar. Mainly classical but am beginning to dip my toes into the pool of fingerstyle, chord-melody jazz. The water there is still a little cold and shark infested though. I’m ok, not a virtuoso, not a beginner, I tick the box intermediate when it comes to the standard of my playing. I have no inate musical talent and I’ve got to the level I have through practice, practice verging on the autistic perhaps but I have now reached a level where I can feel semi-musical at times.
Of course, when I started plucking and fingering all those many years ago the dream was of rock god stardom. The axeman cometh, etc. These dreams of playing in a band, the sort of music I might actually listen to for pleasure still occasionally rear their drink-soaked head and recently almost came to fruition before the added commitments of approaching middle age, sadly, it is my place in the 9 to 5 world, kept getting in the way and we went our seperate ways. Incidently I would have been playing bass, rather than guitar, in this band … I’ve slowly come to realise that bass is actually a much cooler instrument than guitar but it’s not really a solo instrument.
Anyway, back to my meisterwerk … some ten or so years ago I began work on my solo side project as, yet still uncompleted, I have a title:
OPUS 1: Exercises in Pretension
(can you see what I did there?) … and I have a concept for the album cover, a photograph of pre-tensioned steel as used in concrete beams (can you see what I’ve done there?) … however amidst bitter musical differences (with myself?) and the inability to spell pretension correctly consistently … actually would the “deliberate” misspelling, pretention, be even better … hmmm, I’ll think about this … there is nothing else …
… yet!
With this blog I will describe the journey towards the completion of Opus 1, is it destined to remain unfinished … perhaps to be completed posthumously by AN Other? … in addition I will use this blog to muse on music in general, my own and other people’s
