. . . because I am corny like that.

my brother and me

Xay decided he wanted to learn how to play guitar. So he braved the savage beast known as scary big sister and went in her room. And got the guitar out of her closet. Daddy had brought home a miniature guitar from one of his travels many years ago. Yanni has kept it safe in her closet ever since, waiting for me to finally get around to taking it to the music store and replacing its missing strings.

Xay didn’t care whether it had all its strings, or what the pitches were supposed to be for each string. He just wanted to play guitar. So, he started doing what he does on every musical instrument (piano, recorder, Merlin Electronic Puzzle Game, the strings on the window); he starts picking out every tune he knows. I find this terribly flattering, because most of the tunes are ones I wrote.

Curtis saw Xay playing with the guitar and he urged me to (finally) go and buy the proper strings, as well as a beginner book. I wish he’d reminded me to get a pick too. I totally forgot that Xay was using a paper clip instead.

The book came with a couple CDs, and Xay has been watching them to learn how to tune the guitar and how to play a few chords. He thinks he forgot how to play what he was playing before he learned how to tune the guitar. I don’t think his fingers have forgotten, but Xay and Yanni are afflicted with perfect pitch, so if it’s not in the exact key as before, they’re at sea. I don’t have that problem; my relative pitch makes it easy to transpose music, but difficult to pick the right pitch out of the air.

Esteban found this inflated guitar today, and decided he wanted to be just like his big brother. I took video of it too, because Esteban was singing along with Xay’s chords, but Xay looks like a pool of blackness in the video; it’s really not ready for viewing. I still must learn the new camera, and I sorely miss the old one.

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When I can figure out how to do it, I’m going to post a piano lessons series, a lot like cooking blogs, showing the step to step of a piano lesson. If for nothing else, for archival purposes. I have yet to see whether my methods of piano training would be applicable anywhere else.