Fretted Instruments
Jun. 2nd, 2022 08:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
writerkitThe thing about playing a fretted instrument is that you have to maintain your fingertip calluses. I am getting back into mine, which means I will have a week or so before I can seriously attempt practicing anything-- at the moment it's mostly "pull it out and fiddle with a few verses of things, put it away."
I'm going to try doing it more consistently for a longer period this time, because playing mandolin is professionally useful to me. Well, playing "an instrument" is professionally useful although I do think mandolin is probably more useful than harp. (Even my little travel harp is not a storytime instrument, although it's probably good for fascinating a kid once or twice.) Certainly I can get up to speed faster on the mandolin, given that I did that long enough and consistently enough that I don't lose much even over the long periods of time without-- it's just about getting back a small amount of muscle memory. (And at some point I'll try sheet music instead of tab.)
I don't have to be a brilliant mandolin player; I just need to hit a point where I can play some standard-issue nursery songs on it at speed, and then I will have a tiebreaker next time I'm up for a children's librarian job-- because the two things that are often tiebreakers are musical instrument and bilingualism, and getting to a usable level of mandolin is easier than getting to a usable level of French, although I am off and on working on that one too.
And I remain amused that this class I took on a whim mostly becausejducoeur had a mandolin available for me to borrow has now become the most immediately significant of all my college classes-- because even without learning much fingering or many details of melody (they were thirty-person-strong classes of mixed ability level--and in the case of one of the broader music classes, mixed instruments--so there was a level past which we did not get), the fact that I was consistently playing it for years meant it got into my mind and fingers in such a way that even with these long lapses I'm never starting from a place where I have to work to make it sound nice; it's all focus on technique. Or at least it will be once I get my calluses back.
I'm going to try doing it more consistently for a longer period this time, because playing mandolin is professionally useful to me. Well, playing "an instrument" is professionally useful although I do think mandolin is probably more useful than harp. (Even my little travel harp is not a storytime instrument, although it's probably good for fascinating a kid once or twice.) Certainly I can get up to speed faster on the mandolin, given that I did that long enough and consistently enough that I don't lose much even over the long periods of time without-- it's just about getting back a small amount of muscle memory. (And at some point I'll try sheet music instead of tab.)
I don't have to be a brilliant mandolin player; I just need to hit a point where I can play some standard-issue nursery songs on it at speed, and then I will have a tiebreaker next time I'm up for a children's librarian job-- because the two things that are often tiebreakers are musical instrument and bilingualism, and getting to a usable level of mandolin is easier than getting to a usable level of French, although I am off and on working on that one too.
And I remain amused that this class I took on a whim mostly because
jducoeur had a mandolin available for me to borrow has now become the most immediately significant of all my college classes-- because even without learning much fingering or many details of melody (they were thirty-person-strong classes of mixed ability level--and in the case of one of the broader music classes, mixed instruments--so there was a level past which we did not get), the fact that I was consistently playing it for years meant it got into my mind and fingers in such a way that even with these long lapses I'm never starting from a place where I have to work to make it sound nice; it's all focus on technique. Or at least it will be once I get my calluses back.
