we - on learning to read, write and play music

horsemouth is back from a visit out to howard's in sunny east ham.

and it was sunny (if a little cold). to begin horsemouth wandered over to stratford via the marshes and the olympic park. there at stratford international DLR station he boarded the train for west ham and thence via the district line to east ham. he has hardly ever used this particular route and he pronounced london, its new(ish) transport infrastructure  and its people beautiful. 

once in sunny east ham he walked through the market down to the pub with the pizza. there he met howard and they adjourned to the (sunny but cold) back garden for pizza and beer. they then adjourned again inside before adjourning to the big pub that is usually empty (which was strangely full of small children and rugby fans). with heroic efforts wales nearly pulled themselves back from shameful defeat by the english. 

before returning horsemouth called round howard's to pick up the hohner 6 string with the om sign (a very sweet sounding guitar).

in the LRB the poet jo-ann wallace writes about typing. about learning to type in montreal as a teenager (she now lives in alberta). later she types out virginia woolf and in doing so she learnt her style, her way with the comma and the semi-colon (similarly a young joan didion typed out hemmingway). typing is about anticipation and muscle memory, the fingers move to where they think they will be needed.

playing guitar is of course similar. horsemouth regrets never putting much effort into learning other people's stuff. he is a thorough-going bodger of a player. in his defence there never used to be much teaching material around when he started. there was very little film of people playing, if there was they didn't show you what the guitarist was doing they mainly focused on the singer's face. hell when horsemouth started there weren't even instructional videos. there was some tab (but then you needed to know what the tune sounded like to use it), there was some sheet music (but then you needed to know what the music a sounded like and be able to read music to get much use from it). 

then there was then learning by ear or learning from friends (which was the way it was mostly done). 

things didn't start to come together for horsemouth until he started writing and playing his own stuff. except he never wrote it down really. 

horsemouth can (sort of) read music (very slowly). he mainly uses it to find out what the note or chord is at a particular point. he learned to read music at school (there were generalised music lessons for one year with an exceptionally grumpy teacher whose classes a friend of horsemouth with epilepsy was very keen on ditching out of). later horsemouth re-taught himself it by diligent application to howard shanet's how to learn to read music.  

fahey played in the school band (that's where he learned to read music) and he listened to a lot of classical music. 

after the guitar pickup horsemouth went to his child-minding gig and then later home. it's a bright sunny morning.