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My father played one particular song badly and often, on a nylon-string guitar with a warped neck, usually on Sunday evenings when he thought nobody was listening. He died eleven years ago. Last spring I decided I would learn it properly.
A month seemed generous. It took nine, and I can tell you exactly where six of those months went, because they went somewhere embarrassing.
Months one to three: wrong, and confident about it
What I did is what most people do. Put the recording on, play along, adjust until it sounds close enough, call that progress.
It was not progress. It was three months of rehearsing my own mistakes until they got comfortable. The recording covered for me the whole time, and so did the vocal — my father’s version and the original were different anyway, and I sat somewhere between the two, quietly sanding off whatever I could not manage.
The tell was that I could only play it *with* the record on. Alone, the thing collapsed inside four bars. That is a specific and humbling diagnostic, and I ignored it for weeks, because playing along felt like practising and practising felt like enough.
The week I stopped guessing
A friend who teaches piano asked a question I could not answer: what is the bass actually doing under the second verse?
No idea. I had never heard it. The vocal sat directly on top of the frequencies where the answer lived, and my ear kept following the voice, because that is what ears do.
So I used a browser tool to strip the vocal out of a song and listened to what was underneath. Two minutes of work, and it rearranged the entire project.
There was a walking bass line under that verse. It had been sitting there since 1971. Several hundred listens across my life and I had never once heard it, because the vocal was in front of it and it had not occurred to me that the vocal could be moved.
That is the part worth passing on. Nothing was taught to me by a piece of software. Something was simply got out of the way, and my own ears did work they had always been capable of doing.
Month five: naming what I was hearing
Hearing the line and being able to name it turned out to be separate skills, which was news to me.
I could hum that bass part. Naming the notes was beyond me, and without names I could not write it down, and without writing it down I lost it between practice sessions every time.
Forty-one years old and functionally illiterate in the thing I was trying to do.
What helped was taking the version with the vocal removed, running it through software that will turn a recording into notes, and looking at the result on a screen. Not because the output was correct. It was not, entirely — it disagreed with itself in the busy sections and put one passage an octave off.
But a wrong answer you can see beats a right answer you cannot hold. Fixing the errors by ear taught me more than a clean transcription ever would have. Three of those months came back to me.
What the last stretch was actually for
Here is what I expected: once I could hear the parts and name the notes, the playing would follow quickly.
It did not. The final months were repetition in the least glamorous sense. Twenty minutes, most evenings, mostly bad. There is no software for that part, and there should not be.
The repetition was aimed at the right thing, though, which it had not been in March. That is the whole difference between month two and month eight. Same activity, same twenty minutes, completely different return, because by month eight I knew what I was aiming at.
Then I tried to write one
My daughter turned seven in November. I had spent most of a year learning to play something a dead man used to play, and it occurred to me, somewhat late, that she might one day want something of mine.
Learning a song and making one are not adjacent skills. I sat with a guitar for four evenings and produced nothing I would admit to. The blank page does to music what it does to everything else.
What broke it was giving myself something to argue with. I used a tool that will sketch a piece from a written description — a few lines about the tempo and the feel I wanted — and listened to what came back. It was not the song, and it was not going to become the song.
But I could hear immediately that the chorus resolved too early, and I knew that because of the nine months. A year earlier I would have had no opinion at all. Now I had a specific, arguable complaint, and a complaint is somewhere to start.
The version she got at Christmas is mine. It began as a reaction to something I disagreed with, which turns out to be how most of my better ideas start.
The six months I would like back
They went to a particular kind of cowardice, and I recognise it from other parts of my life.
Playing along with the vocal still in felt productive and cost me nothing. It never once told me I was wrong. Turning the recording off to find out what I actually knew was available on day one, and I avoided it for three months, because I already suspected the answer.
Asking my friend the bass question was the same avoidance in a different coat. She would have told me in April. July is when I finally asked, because not knowing felt better than admitting I did not know — a trade most men I know have made about something.
Nine months for one song is not a good ratio. Three would have been fine. The difference was not talent, or time, or equipment. It was how long I was willing to keep the evidence out of the room.
Something to try this week
Take the song you have been playing along to. Turn the recording off, vocal and all, and play it alone, the whole way through, badly.
Whatever falls apart is the actual assignment. Not the entire song — that one specific bar where your hands stop knowing what comes next. Work on that for a week.
It is a small exercise and it is not really about music. Most of what I do badly, I do badly because I have arranged my life so that I never have to hear it on its own.
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