Boomer Journals 5 – That One Downside of Learning to Play the Guitar

 

The type of voice that I envied when I was younger was a deep bass voice. I thought it would have been much cooler rather than this baritone, especially when in a choir.

By the way, is it at all possible to train your voice to reach a lower range? I thank heavens that I didn’t have any of it if ever there were such lessons.

Then I learned to play the guitar. I never attained the caliber of Kirk Hammet or Slash by the way, despite that I’ve been aching for a kick ass talent such as theirs. But I can proudly say that I’m much better than someone who just started to hug the six-string.

Videoke would have been perfect but it wasn’t that common back then. Our only access to music was either by radio or Walkman. Or by means of a six-string which I immediately indulged myself into.

I thought it was already cool to be able to jam with a six-string, to sing and all that, be it in a crowd or in one’s alone time. I was even able to enhance it to a certain extent.

And then I discovered a problem. It wasn’t a big deal at first but it had been bugging the hell out of me ever since for years:

I couldn’t sing most of the songs I love in the same pitch as the original singer’s. If I ever do finish a song, it is with a lot of difficulty. That difficulty I attribute to playing the guitar.

Why? You see, there is a standard tune for the key of C, for example, which of course you will never be able to tune your guitar into unless you have a tuned piano nearby. In most cases, people (me included) don’t care at all if the key of C isnt the same as the standard so long as you can enjoy the moment and cajole the instrument to your heart’s content. So the pitch where you sing the song becomes totally different from the pitch of the original.

And only when you sing along with the radio or in a videoke will you realize that you’ve been duped into believing that you can sing like Steve Perry. Depressing isn’t it?

Maybe if I just focused all my juvenile energies back then trying to improve my range instead of learning to play the guitar, I now would have been singing ala Moriuchi Takahiro, Brandon Boyd, Zach dela Rocha, or the front man of the attached video, eh?