Learning to Play

Making music out of nothing at all.

“Self-taught, thank you very much,” Steve Buscemi spits out, drunkenly strumming a guitar he’d snatched from the band playing at his brother’s wedding in “The Wedding Singer.”

The scene always makes me laugh, in large part probably because of Steve Buscemi. But I have to admit that the sneering pride with which he boasted that he taught himself to play the guitar is something I’ve been wanting to declare to the world myself — if only I had actually gotten decent playing skills.

My older sister and I got a guitar each when I was around 13 years old. My mom scraped together some money so we could buy them from a little store that had opened up close to our neighborhood. It wasn’t fancy, and the guitars weren’t from a well-known brand, but they were brand new and locally made, and of course I loved mine to bits. It was a simple brown acoustic guitar with steel strings. My mom couldn’t have given me a more treasured present. She made us promise to take care of them and to be responsible for their care and maintenance, and for saving up for any accessories that we wanted to get. And most of all, she told us to use them as much as we could.

I never considered getting lessons from a professional music teacher. I figured that there were plenty of people around us who knew how to play and I could just ask them for valuable tips and tricks. My other sister’s boyfriend at the time was a bass player in a band and he knew how to play the guitar as well; I liked him a lot because he loved music like I did, and he knew so much more about musicians. He always gave us mixed tapes of songs from the ’80s and pretty much helped me learn all about that decade. He was a big help in my guitar-playing education.

I was also part of the choir at our church then, and our choirmaster of course was an excellent guitar player. He and his brother were equally gifted in singing and playing guitar and even wrote some songs themselves, so it wasn’t surprising to find myself gravitating toward them for some lessons.

Aside from those, I would spend time each day that year teaching myself whatever I could. I bought a music magazine every week; these local magazines published song lyrics with chords and tabs. Also, each issue had a chord chart as the centerfold, so I detached those and stuck them to my bedroom wall. I would pick a song I wanted to play, then look up the indicated chords on the charts on my wall. If I had a cassette of the song (yes, this was before CDs began dominating the music store shelves), I would play it over and over so I could understand the strumming patterns.

From this simple yet devoted level of practice, I managed to master a number of chords and play a lot of the songs that I liked, both old and new. I figured it wasn’t as complicated as learning how to play, say, a didgeridoo, which requires a specific breathing technique to produce the desired sound. I had a pretty decent singing voice at the time, too (I haven’t indulged in singing in a long while and my voice is no longer as smooth and on-key as before), so it even became common for me to join some school performances.

Knowing how to play an instrument is such a wonderful experience. I loved having my own guitar to bring to school or to pick up at home every time I felt like crooning out a beloved tune. It comforted me and made me happy to be able to play. I do wish, however, that I had gotten formal lessons so that I could have improved and taken my playing skills further, so I could jam with other musicians, or even write my own songs. That’s still a dream of mine — to write a heartfelt song someday. I suppose it’s never too late; I can still get a teacher and get better even though I’m older, right? Hey, I might even attempt to pick up that didgeridoo and sign up for lessons for that, too — see how that would sound. That would be neat.