After
a good staff meeting at the church and an even better lunch meeting with my
wife, I somewhat hesitantly headed out to my advanced ukulele class
yesterday. I have received three
different emails about that class, all indicating that it probably wouldn’t
have enough students to actually meet.
Then I got the standard, “Your class will meet …” email. So, I went to check it out.
And
it was pretty much as I feared. Oh, the
instructor was still quite personable.
The people in the class are nice old dudes like me. There are only ten in the class instead of
the usually required fifteen, though.
Apparently the instructor convinced the powers that be to still have the
class. So all of those were good
things. Then class began.
Now,
I had been working on the first several pages of the new book before class
began. As a result I had an idea of what
could happen here. There is a lot of
individual note picking instead of the usual chord strumming that I like. Why is that a problem? Because I have absolutely no background in
reading music. I remember the “Every
Good Boy Does Fine” and “FACE” memory tools, but apparently that knowledge is supposed
to be second nature by the time one reaches this particular class. I still have to go through the whole scale
thingy for every note. And that does not
make for quick transitions. I suppose
that’s the bane of learning something in a classroom setting rather than with
private lessons. See, the instructor
just keeps on going. And most of the people
in the class have no problem at all following him. I can make it through about five notes before
I get totally lost. I think our beloved
teacher realized that at one point. I guess
he could see the blank stare on my face. So he provided us with the chords to that
particular song and gave us the option of just playing those. That saved my bacon. Well, until he started some thing where he
was counting notes on his knuckles and saying when he got from his thumb to his
pinky that meant you could change the note and add a seventh to it. I had no idea what that meant. When he did it the fourth time I figured it
was something that was supposed to be helpful, but I didn’t even know the words
he was using. I haven’t felt that lost
since high school geometry proofs or trigonometry, with all its sines and
cosines.
Now I
have to give props to my lovely and talented wife. She is a piano player from way back, so she
tried to give me a crash course in music theory before class. She did help me understand the point in those
five lines with the extra notes penciled in underneath the line. I finally figured out that you have to start
with C down under the lines, then do the alphabet up from there, but you only
go up to G in this particular alphabet before you start over again. I backed up completely and now I’m trying to
learn it like I did when I learned Greek.
It doesn’t really matter what the name of the note is, as long as I know
that it’s the one that comes out when I pluck a certain string with my finger
pressed down at a certain fret. Of
course that will not help me in class. He
gets going in a song and never stops, and his way of helping is to say the names
of the notes out loud as he races along, like I actually know them. I think I may be in over my head here.
Colossians
3:23-24 says, “Whatever you do, work at
it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know
that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord
Christ you are serving.”
Father,
I could use some help with the reactivation of some musically-inclined brain
cells. Amen.
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