Metronome

I should've bought a metronome the same day I bought my first guitar.

Time is, of course, one of those annoying absolutes. In the music world, the tempo of a song is inescapable and always present. And when I first got the acoustic guitar, I pretty much ignored the whole question of tempo--I just wanted to learn where the notes were, how to make chords, etc. I'd worry about tempo later.

This despite the fact that I knew, from my singing days, that I do not have a natural sense of rhythm. My internal clock works great at getting me up at the right time in the morning, but it does not instinctively know how to count one-two-three one-two-three. Not accurately, anyway.

The good news: it's definitely learnable. There was an HBO program a few weeks ago where Dave Stewart interviewed Ringo Starr, and Ringo mentioned that when he first started drumming he really couldn't keep time at all. Say what you will about Ringo's drumming--he was always known as a rock-solid timekeeper. So this stuff can be learned. I just need to, you know, actually learn it.

As mentioned before, when I bought the bass I also bought a metronome. A couple weeks ago I finally reopened one of the learn-guitar books I bought months ago, before the bass, and decided to start again from page one--this time with the metronome. Turns out, it made a huge difference. When the ticker keeps ticking, you don't have the luxury of waiting till your fingers find the right note to play--you just have to soldier forward, and if it's wrong you either press on then try again later, or you stop and go back to the beginning.

Because a song is what it is, and the notes must be right, and the time signature must be observed. That's all there is to it. I would've been far better off if I'd observed this reality from the beginning.

And by the way, I'm picking things up on the bass far faster than on the guitar. I've already got one song pretty well down ("Comfortably Numb") and am learning another ("Come Together")--whereas on the guitar, I still don't have any songs all the way down, still struggling to put together "Here Comes the Sun." And as friend Buffie (the real musician of our little group) put it a couple weeks ago, after Marc and I successfully played "Comfortably Numb" start to finish, "Looks like you've found your first instrument." Yay. But still more, more, more to learn.

I'll tell you this, though--there was some sturm und drang this weekend, of the serious sort--and I suddenly discovered that having guitars around helped enormously. It was wonderful to just pick up the acoustic and noodle for a while, to take my mind off things. In this way, one falls in love with the instrument that little bit more.

Just one last question. Would a metrosexual gnome be called a metrognome? I'm just askin'.

(And anyone who thinks I wrote this whole entry just so I could tell that one joke, gold star for you!)