Sunday, April 22, 2007

While my guitar gently weeps

Recently I have been picking away at my guitar. I learned a couple of new simple songs, and I have been using it to aid in my singing. Part of my York audition was to sing an unaccompanied song, but I find that practicing with my guitar helps my voice find where it's supposed to be.

But not twenty minutes ago a tragedy occurred. I had leaned my guitar against my laundry hamper hastily last night before conking out for some much needed sleep. This afternoon I carelessly hopped into my computer chair and rolled back. This was the result:




Gentle Ben!

For those unfamiliar with the tradition of guitar naming, generally a male names his guitar after a woman who broke his heart. Since no men (or women) had broken my heart to this point I went for the next closest thing: I named the guitar just after Ben Affleck had begun to date Jennifer Lopez. Plus the name has a lovely ring for a soft accoustic "classical" guitar.

I have had the guitar since I was 11. It was a Christmas present. At the time I was in the Seneca Central guitar club (which largely consisted of myself, Chris Jaic, Willy Harris and Kassandra Killman trying to get out of recess by hanging around inside pretending to learn to play guitar). I took lessons for a short while and then kind of put the guitar aside for a number of years, forgetting virtually everything aside from how some of the chords looked.

A few years ago I picked it up again and started to learn a few songs, with some encouragement from my fella, brother and a few guitar-saavy friends. Gentle Ben has been an easy guitar to learn on with his nylon strings and small body. I will miss him. As a tribute to Ben (not, I promise, as a punishment to anyone else) I am putting up one of the videos I took of myself singing and playing so that I could hear how I sounded.

My singing is its usual shakey self and I kind of screw up during the chorus, but in the immortal words of Mr Burns: "We did 35 takes, and THIS was the best one."


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Oh no!

I can't really see what happened to it in that pic - is the neck snapped off?

If it's not in itty-bitty pieces there's a chance it can be glued back together, as improbable as that sounds. And an extra hole in the body never hurts a cheap guitar (look at mine).

If it's officially dead though, do you want my old bass? I don't play it anymore and it just needs strings.

Frankly I think the world needs a few more female bass-playing Shakespearean actors. :-D