NATCHITA

Today marks my father’s birthday. He would have been 49 years old. He died unexpectedly on July 14h of last year.

Just a few months prior to his passing, I had began developing a strong taste for orchestral music. Then, my grandma asks me if I am interested in taking his violin. It was fate. I began taking lessons around Mid-November. I had a very rudimentary knowledge of music theory up until this point. I played guitar and sang in choir for a semester when I was in high school. My approach to music before now had been very laissez-fair. But today, I hit a big milestone by taking off the training wheels of one of the most difficult instruments to learn.

Off came the finger tapes!

I was not advised to do this yet. I just felt like the finger tapes were holding me back. I don’t know where exactly my fingers need to be at all times yet, but now that I’ve had a practice session without the tapes, I feel it was much easier to locate the correct pitch as I had predicted.

Beginner violinists learn to play alongside strips of tape on the fingerboard that guide the player towards the relative locations of beginner notes. Take a look at a diagram of the A scale from one of my books:

In practice, the notes don’t feel straightly aligned like this when ergonomics is factored in. On my particular instrument, it feels like the notes shown above correspond more like this:

The tapes had become a visual distraction that ware sending my brain mixed signals.

I’ve been given the gift of being able to observe my mind construct a fine-tuner in real time. It’s quite the demanding cognitive development. My brain needs to listen to violin everyday because I can see the widest range of pitch within violin sounds. I almost don’t want to listen to any other instrument. Genre doesn’t really affect my preferences much.

I’m re-discovering a plethora of songs from an entirely new perspective. Consider this song I am completely entranced by:

Yes, Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso. The musical Illuminati behind this song is absolutely brilliant. The absolutely cheesy lyrics used to drive me nuts, but now I can completely embrace the siren call of this tune in the enchanting comfort of strings.

My dad’s main drive in life was music (more specifically, the trombone) and I’m starting to see why. I just needed some seriously isolated constraint to see the full rainbow of frequencies. Every piece of music that is on-key and played well in a string melody sounds really good to me. I can’t get enough of it.

After my dad died, I decided to use my bereavement leave to finally try oil painting and I created this muddy recreation of the photo of my dad above:

I have no idea how to fix it. I have layers upon layers of the same mistakes covering past mistakes and now the new mistakes look worse than the old mistakes. I had to stop trying a few months ago. I’ve poured a lot of time into this painting… I think it just needs to go on my wall of humility. I shall start over.

Thanks for reading this post. I’m reconstructing Shitcoin Citizen as an archive of observations. discoveries, and personal achievements.

Stay tuned ❤