This is my first post involving an idea that was brought up by an anonymous peer in class the other day! By the way, thank you!!! The idea is to ask people around campus what they like to do in their spare time. I wanted to start this off by doing a trial run with one of my friends.
His response once asked after our incredibly boring general psychology class was, “I play the guitar maaaaannnn.” I was relieved. I’m not trying to run through Brower dining hall naked just yet, I mean this is the first one! I’m assuming most people like to run through public places naked in their spare time, of course.
Luckily, I happend to come to school this year with the very typical goal of wanting to learn how to play the guitar, so this was something I actually looked forward to. Not so lucky for me, I haven’t picked it up more than 4 times since I’ve been here, so needless to say, I suck!
So the idea is to do the activity or whatever it is that the person I ask comes up with and spend about an hour with it. My objective in this case was to learn a song! Shouldn’t be hard, right? Well I found that even though I have a shaky background with music from my middle school jazz band years on the drums (ahh the glory days) , this was a different monster.
In fact, this was a monster that I have no lessons with or experience at all messing around with, so I went to the sacred site of tabs. For those of you who don’t know, tabs are pretty much music sheets that use numbers coresponding with the frets and strings of the guitar instead of notes. This makes it possible for a complete noob like myself to make sounds that resemble a song!
Guitar Tabs
The song I fiddled around with is Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’.” I knew that it had very simple chords and would be something I could spend time on and know what it actually should sound like! I am still figuring out how to record a video and post it on this blog, so when that gets figured out, I will show you the beautiful masterpiece that is my music.
As I was playing I thought about the funny contrast between how good people sometimes think they are and how good they actually sound. In my case it mostly applies to my singing. In my head i’m a rockstar, but the sad truth appears every time I open my mouth for the words to come out. Luckily, we have ‘American Idol’ to affirm i’m not the only one with this illusion.
I will post the video ASAP!!
R U Nation 
