You’re definitely never too old to learn to play. You can learn anything you want whenever you want. It may not be what a specific age group may be looking for but that’s a different issue. Learning is lifelong!
As for the overwhelming info you’ll find online; just pick and choose what you want because that will make you YOU.
Even though you don’t understand everything people are saying, it’s important to simply be exposed to the discussions themselves and eventually things will fall into place or may trigger a question or even an answer.
A basic understanding of music theory/guitar basics goes a long way of course so definitely keep digging or go for structured lessons but don’t worry too too much.
As an introvert myself, the staying indoors portion of the last couple of years has been a godsend. Maybe not a ‘godsend’ but you know what I mean: Working from home; Not wasting time in traffic; Being confined to the place I feel most comfortable in with the people I’m closest to; these things have been great! I’ve never practiced as much (guitar) so I’ve never played better and I’ve never accomplished as much as I have in the last 2 years. Granted that it didn’t happen due to Covid alone as my change began with losing my job in 2019 and being forced to make changes that I simply continued to pursue throughout 2020 despite Covid.
There were and still are plenty of challenges, fears and confusion as well as the actual illness itself and all the physical, psychological, and social damage it has caused but those small ‘positives’ I’m referring to were pretty much all I/we had to hold on to while waiting for the pandemic to take its course and while waiting for vaccines etc.
It’s been a heck of a roller coaster ride that’s for certain but it may finally be time to get back to ‘normal’ albeit a different normal than what we’ve been used to.
There are still plenty of question marks on how exactly we need to proceed to go back to normal. Not only is it confusing to know what is ok or safe to do, we just don’t know what to expect when temperatures cool down again and flu season rolls back in or whether these vaccines have helped or not.
That said, we’ve decided to start the band back up and now comes the challenge of logistics. What songs will we play? What styles? What equipment will we need? Who will play what? Where will we practice? When do we practice? How often? Small things but huge questions for everyone involved as everyone has their personal situations that need to be considered.
We’re all a little confused right now but we’re also all excited as there is much to benefit from in hanging out with good people, performing with and exchanging ideas with good musicians with good intentions and at some point sharing our efforts with family and friends as well.
I’m looking forward to this so much and I can’t wait to get some answers.
For now, I’m tuningup and tuningout but please do stay tuned for more updates.
The first and most obvious element we recognize in music is pitch in my opinion. A melody is made up of various pitches or notes occurring at specific intervals/distances from one another that make them noticeable, pleasing or not. Melody is usually what captures people the most about music as a well composed melody can convey an emotion that we can relate to. The most natural instrument used to communicate a melody is the voice. The attempt to recreate sounds or melodies requires our ability to recognize pitches, sound quality, and duration of notes and while it isn’t necessary to know the science itself in order to imitate these sounds, you would need to intuitively recognize these characteristics at a bare minimum.
So what are pitches? If you take whistling as an example, you can see how changing the size of the space between your lips and the placement of the tongue affects the sound you make. Similarly, if you take a balloon filled with air and pinch the balloon to let a small amount of air out, you can control the amount of air rushing out of the balloon. Loosening the opening allows more air to pass through and for the rubber to vibrate at a slower speed while stretching/pulling the rubber farther apart will tighten the opening causing the rubber to vibrate at a much faster frequency. The faster vibration results in a higher sound while the slower vibration results in a lower sound. This is exactly what occurs when singing except the tightening and loosening occurs in the vocal chords.
When playing guitar, there is a slight difference as it is an actual string that is vibrating however the concept is similar in that the slower a string vibrates, the lower the sound will be and as you shorten the string by holding subsequently higher frets, the vibration of the string increases and therefore causes subsequently higher pitches/notes/sounds.
A balloon, vocal chords, or whistling sounds are a result of air rushing through as it is the air that causes the vibration of the balloon or vocal chords. In the case of a guitar, since it is not a wind instrument but rather a string instrument, the string must be struck, or plucked, for it to vibrate, just as a percussion instrument must be hit for it to emit a sound.
Pitch can therefore be initiated through the act of striking, plucking, or blowing air onto or through something for which the frequency of the vibration can be controlled in a way that will cause a rise or drop in pitch. The movement of the air particles, or sound wave, can then travel to a receiver … recording device or the human ear, which can then interpret the tone, pitch, and amplitude signals into sound.
Sound waves can be compared to dropping a rock into a lake. A small pebble will create multiple small ripples while a large rock will create lesser but bigger ripples over the same distance. The ripples, although they are moving water particles instead of air, would be a visual representation of how sound waves work. Over time the height of the ripple will begin to decrease until the ripple is no longer visible, just as the volume of a sound wave will decrease until it is no longer heard.
In music, an A note/pitch is a frequency that is vibrating at 440 Hz while a G note is vibrating at 392Hz and a B note which is higher than A would be vibrating at 493.88 Hz over a similar moment in time (ie. millisecond). Doubling the frequency (or speed) would mean that you will hear the same note yet at a higher pitch … for example an A note vibrates at 440Hz and is called A4 while a note vibrating at 880Hz is still an A but is called an A5 since it is still an A but at a higher pitch or ‘octave’. Octaves will be explained in better detail soon so don’t be too concerned about not understanding this term right now. The importance of this section is to understand that pitch is determined by the speed at which the sound wave is vibrating within a given duration and that the number of repeated vibrations, or ‘repetitions’ are what is called ‘frequency’.
That said, if you do experiment with creating different pitches, you’ll notice that at some point you won’t hear very high or very low pitches. This does not mean that there is no sound presently being made however, as the human ear can only hear a specific range of frequencies (20 Hz to 20,000 Hz). Younger people have a wider range while older people have a narrower range of hearing as they lose their ability to hear over time … either due to aging, from over exposure to louder music throughout their lives, or both. While increasing volume might allow you to hear some of these frequencies that are normally out of our range of hearing, there is a limit to what our ears can handle both in frequency and in volume therefore you will eventually stop hearing certain frequencies. Dogs, for example, have a different hearing range from humans and can therefore hear much higher pitch frequencies than humans. This is why a dog whistle is heard by a dog but not a human.
Note: Be very careful if you attempt to raise the volume in an attempt to hear these sounds as you may actually damage your hearing in the process since your ear is still attempting to process the sound even though it may not have the ability to convert it to a signal that the brain can interpret.
I could just have easily compared pitch to length or width since there is no particular reason to think that higher sounds are at the top and lower sounds are at the bottom however I specifically chose to compare pitch to height so that I could explain how we automatically assume that a slower vibrating sound is ‘lower’ while a faster vibrating sound is ‘higher’. The reason for the change in pitch is due to the vibration speed or frequency over time however we generally understand or express faster vibrations as being physically higher sounds and slower vibrations as lower sounds.
