Another week out the shop
8 Apr 2020
This week was when I finally accepted that there’s not much I can do right now on the guitar building front given I can’t get to the workshop, at least in terms of what is of interest for here (e.g., I have admin I can do, but that’s a bit dull to talk about each week).
I’ve always held a high value on working in a shared workshop: you get to be with other makers, and besides the obvious social benefits, it means you’re around people who can help you when you get stuck and who you can learn from as they do things differently to you. I’d deliberately avoided even considering setting up a space on my own as I believe in the importance of having other makers around you to help expose you to new techniques and ideas.
Unfortunately that plan didn’t consider the current time of lockdown, which means I can’t get into such workshops. Whilst in theory I could go to the workshop and try keep a safe distance from other people, guitar building is not currently essential to putting a roof over my head, and I have no pressing deadlines, so I don’t consider it essential that I risk anyone’s health by heading out. My sister is a nurse, and I don’t want her and her colleagues who are hard at work being put at any more risk than they already are, so I’m going to do my part and stay home.
I had hoped to find some tasks on building I could do at home, but in reality having been without a workshop until just before this lockdown I’d already done all those tasks. What I really want to be doing right now is building: doing actual woodwork and improving my skills there, so unless someone comes along out the blue with a request for some pre-build work, there’s not much going to be happening here for a while.
That just means this blog is now a bit dull, for which I do apologise, but I just wanted to be upfront with this rather than continuing to feel guilty each week when I come to write these notes and I have nothing to share with you. On top of everything else I think none of us need unnecessary guilt right now.
It’s not that I’m not keeping myself busy, I’ve been throwing myself into some other outlets that I can do whilst I’m home, which I’ll document below. But I do want to encourage everyone reading (if you still are) to accept that things are not normal right now, and some things will need to change whilst that’s gone, and that’s okay. Find new ways to occupy yourself for now, find new ways to learn something or engage in a hobby that you’d not otherwise considered you had time for, and focus on that for a bit and see where it leads you. But please don’t be like me and spend your time feeling guilty for things out of your control!
So in terms of setting an example of how I’m trying to pass the time, I have two examples of what I’m doing during this lockdown period, so that I can still be in that fun intersection I enjoy of having a creative outlet and learning something new.
Firstly, whilst I can play guitar to an okay level, I have to confess that I can’t listen to a song and just play it from memory: I have to find the music or tabs somewhere: either in a youtube video or usually on somewhere like Sheet Music Direct, as that has an iPad app and I can prop that on my music stand. But there’s often times when I hear a song I’d like to play and I can’t find the music for it, at which point I’m just stuck, so I want to try and fix that.
To this end, inspired by our neighbour’s kid’s piano lessons where I hear him working hard at taking those first music steps to play nursery rhymes, I figured it’s time I similarly go back to basics and try work up to this skill. At first I tried to play the same nursery rhymes from memory, but it turns out my memory of those is somewhat sketchy: if you ant to play a song from memory you need to first have a good memory of how it goes :)
Instead, my guitar teacher recommended a few similar level songs (basic vocal melodies we all know in the major scale), and we settled on Auld Lang Syne, and so I spent some time this week trying to work out how to play that from memory. Much to my surprise, with a lot of scratching my head, pencil and paper, and some very bad notes, I got there in the end.
In the past I had tried simple blues songs and failed, but I suspect this is a very me way of learning: strip it back to basics and build up. I do this in woodwork, and it’s worked again here. So now I need to find a few more tunes like this and slowly work my way up in complexity.
The other creative learning I’m working on is improving my photo editing skills. I’ve been an avid photographer for over a decade now, but the last several years I’ve not really published any photos outside of the ones I use to illustrate this blog. I’ve struggled to get photos to look how I wanted ever since I moved over to Adobe Lightroom from Apple’s Aperture software when they killed it off; Aperture suited the way I wanted to work, and Lightroom never did, so I just took photos and never did anything with them, and in the end that kinda stopped me taking photos.
So, as with the playing guitar by ear, I’ve decide to step back, and use this great backlog of unprocessed photos I have as a way to properly learn how to use Lightroom, to let me adjust exposure, colour, and so on to get the output I want. I’m documenting this over on my personal blog, as it’s not really a topic for here, but I’ve found this a very rewarding thing to spend time on, as it lets me improve my skills whilst also letting me virtually get out my house as I review photos from old road trips we went on.
Whilst not guitar related directly, I also hope it’ll turn into a useful skill for when I do get back to the workshop, as a lot of this blog is pictures of the process, and I hope the skills I pick up there will have a positive impact here.
So there you have it, a couple of things I’m doing whilst I have to part the guitar building for a while. I hope you too can find ways to pass the time, and certainly don’t feel bad about not being able to do what you could before: at the moment the best thing to do is accept it and make sure you stay safe and well for your loved ones, so we can get back to what we want to do when this moves on from this lock down phase.