Are you a Musician?

[Edella]

I know a few of us are musicians,(Tormod,Orby),but how many Hypography members are?What instrument do you play?How long have you played?What style?Have you taken lessons?Etc,Etc.

[Turtle]

I play a mean tapping foot & audacious air tamborine. Other than that I have a grammar school level understanding of music. I own & occasionaly play a couple harmonicas ( a C & a G) & a djambe drum. I love music but I have an aversion to watching it performed. Since a couple people called my harmonica wheezing "music", I assert I am a musician...a crappy musician, but a musician nonetheless.

[Tormod]

Nice to be listed. I have played music since about age 6 when I joined the marching band at school and failed *miserably* to play the alto horn (it was bigger than me and I wanted to play the trumpet). I then sang in a very good choir until my voice broke around 12-13. Meanwhile I had picked up classical guitar and took lessons a local music school. After high school I took a Music Ed year at a college in Norway, but transferred to the US where I took a Bachelor of Music in performance on classical guitar, with jazz as a sort of "unofficial" minor. Piano was compulsory, too. This all ended around 1992, after which I began teaching guitar downtown Oslo at my own private evening school. When I tired of that I started playing some Big Bands (ie, swing jazz) but it only lasted about 4 years. Now I don't play any bands at all but I dabble in pop/rock/electronica in my "home studio" (ie, a PC, a huge MIDI keyboard, and lots of soft synths used via my Ableton Live sequencer).

But I started taking piano lessons again last year, and will continue this fall. It's fun but I don't have much time...

[Drip Curl Magic]

mmmm,

I got interested in musicianship at the age of 11.

when I turned 13, I finally started taking drum lessons.

Stuck with that for a year or so before losing interest and picking up a guitar instead.

when I was 16, I started dabbling and experimenting with bass guitar.

Shortly afterwards, I inherited an outdated recording studio, a keyboard, a new guitar, and a bass.

and somewhere along the way, I aquired an Ocarina, some bongos, a tamborine, a cowbell, a drumset, and vaious other percussion instruments.

And a few months ago, I bought some turntables.

I play some instruments much more than others.

But my guitar and bass have always been my favorites.

[orbsycli]

I'm very happy to hear that you've got a djembe, turtle.
you may be interested in reading the scrolls found at this address:
http://www.shamanic.net/articles/shamanicdrumming.html

Tormod in big band! That must have been some sweet kicks right there!

I'm a musician and barely anything more,
can't function normally without allowing my creative rivers flow from time to time.

Stress is like beaver dams.

smoke is like ignus fatuus, and loads of rushing water.

you can find me banging on all sorts of drums,
constantly tapping at least one limb
I just bought a sitar, so I've got a couple years worth of intense learning ahead of me-
Like always.

Guitars are my specialty. Basic string instrument.
Learned to hear the phasing,
learned to see the sine waves.

But wait! Not only do I mess around with analogue motion,
but I'm a wiz(ard) with digital music production.
I've got a pro tools set up that my dad bought as a write-off for his business,
'cause he used it to record a commercial for his insurance company (Genius!)

Love love love the rhythms,
don't know why but I'm here for them
that's all I do is let them in
and see where my brain will take them
and me
at the hands of instruments I project and resonate my existence
transcending everything I've ever learned and thought into one moment,
leading to the next.

Tie-dye.

Psychedelic progressive jazz,
5 years experience with guitars.
4 years experience with music production.

[CraigD]

I learned to play the horn (coronet/trumpet) in elementary school band – I’m vague on the grade, but I think 3rd, when I was 8. At 13, I started branching out into as many of the valved horns as I could lay hands on and they’d let me – my favorite was the French horn, but I mostly got stuck playing sousaphone (the tuba variant that wraps around you so you can march with it). At 16, I changed schools, and joined a “stage band”. It was “bring you own instrument”, so I was back to the trumpet, the only instrument I owned.

I’ve loved to sing since before I could remember. Playing horn and singing present insurmountable difficulties – I did a bit of scatty play-then-sing stuff with the stage band, but didn’t much like that style. Like any self-respecting teenage American in the ‘70s, what I really wanted was to be a rock musician. One day, as a walked along a road lamenting my non-rock life, I came upon a Sears electric bass guitar, with sunburst finish but the pickups missing, lying on the gravel shoulder. I took this as a sign, got hold of some replacement electronics, and, in the tradition of uneducated bass players like soon-to-be Sid Vicious, got into a series of student rock bands.

From age 19 to 24, I wasn’t in a band, and didn’t own a musical instrument. At 25, I started dating my soon-to-be wife, who was a folk/country/western/honkytonk singer and guitar player – that is, she made some extra money playing whatever was popular in bars and clubs from CA to TX to WV. I started playing guitar so I could hang out and sing and play with her, and she gave me a nice Alvarez 6-string acoustic for Xmass 1985, 9 months before we married.

Through the ‘80s, I sang and played rock/folk “street” guitar – that is, I stood in parks and on streets and attracted whatever audience I could. Since the street for me then included Peace Park, in back of the White House, my folk music was naturally pretty political – think Steve Earl, except he’s talented.

In the ‘90s, I started getting sucked into bluegrass bands, which were just beginning to call themselves things like “newgrass”, etc. My youngest son had latched onto the mandolin when he was about 6, because, at the time, he thought they were made small so that children could handle them. Around ’98, a band my wife was in felt it was short after a moody guitarist quit it, and asked me to play guitar and sing in it. The band was 3 guitars and a banjo – an awful mix for bluegrass – and we happened to have just been given a mandolin (I think our houseguest at the time stole it from the music store where he worked), so I started playing that instead, having learned it slightly while teaching my son how to play it. Thus, I became know as a “hot” mandolin player (the key, I’ve discovered, is mostly to be enthusiastic, and develop really fast picking speed – otherwise, the mandolin is a tremendously easy instrument to play)

For Xmass 2003, I got a nice fiddle (violin), but have yet to get good enough to play in other than at friendly social settings. Though tuned like it, the violin is way harder to play than the mandolin!

My current band is semi-dysfuntional at the moment, though committed to playing a festival and some shows in the fall. It’s “spacegrass”, meaning guitar, banjo, mandolin, and bass, playing classic and original psychedelic rock with a specking of bluegrass idioms.

I love music. It does me more good, I fear, than I do it.

[jamongo]

Guitar. Play da' guitar. Ohhh, I love da' guitar. (Dr. Hook)

I've been pluckin' for a good many years now. Not very good, but when we gather around the fire on the beach at night and inhale a few brews, da' folks seem to enjoy the music that oozes its way out.

[orbsycli]

Originally Posted by jamongo

Guitar. Play da' guitar. Ohhh, I love da' guitar. (Dr. Hook)

I've been pluckin' for a good many years now. Not very good, but when we gather around the fire on the beach at night and inhale a few brews, da' folks seem to enjoy the music that oozes its way out.

Ah,
the essence of life.

[Mercedes Benzene]

I can sing... if that counts.

[pgrmdave]

I played trumpet in high school, but I haven't played much since then. I miss the feeling of being in a big ensemble, and of being in a marching band...