After the abrupt
separation on October 30th 2005,
I started playing the guitar.
After some six months trying at some chords
with some success, I suddently found myself
tapping the strings idly, of bordom.
As Crickets II has the first U2 occurence,
I had heard it with obsession many times over,
always waiting patiently for my call for joy.
It rang constantly in my head during those days,
especially my favored part:
A faint left hand, where the notes are not easily
memorable at first listening.
With my 70s Rock listening experience,
this kind of thing always attracted me
more than the main tracks.
So my left hand fingers naturally were tapping Crickets II,
while my right is hanging idle from the shoulder.
Hey, listen to this, I am playing with Shira.
There was no one there to share my joy.
It was nevertheless a turn of events in the favor
of my guitar learning.
It only took for crickets II to be over enough
times for my fingers to be totally paralyzed,
and then I glued myself to the computer
screen, watching over again a long remebered
Stanley Jordan video.
Not only does his system happen to have
brought me on an imaginary stage with Shira -
of shear luck -
but I also discovered he is a superb educator,
and take guidance from him with this single
video for some time now and still.
Following methodically his guidance of avoiding
doing anything that is more complicated than
necessery, for the purpose of rapid learning,
I glued myself to this one sequence.
Even though the notes didn't even match most of the time,
the rythm was there, and I could imagine hearing the part
for which my playing matches the notes.
After all, I know it all and can listen in paralel
to my ears and my memories,
as long as the rythm fits.
And my fingers are slowly learning some speed
with this single sequence, while I am playing
with my beloved lost adopted daughter.
With the
Audacity open source mixing software,
I turned the speed down to my comfort level
as per Stanley Jordan's religious rule:
Zero mistakes, as slow as needed,
and slowly but surely got up to speed.
It was only then starting to bother me that I am not
playing the right tunes some of the time.
So I started on those.
Then I remembered from olf explanations,
that the original notes present a creativty problem:
During the first seven minutes Shira takes advantage
of the synth quality of being able to hold the keys down
indefinitely,
and plays this one chord thruoghout,
not allowing me to join with a similar rythm with the guitar.
There is no rythm in the left hand of the original work.
After about a month of discussing this with
the crickets and the guitar,
it all fell into place on its own:
A small sequence of notes from the creative parts,
was reused to accompany the first seven minutes,
thereby keeping strict the zero-creativity concept.
By Shira's sixteenth birthday,
a year and a bit from when I started, I was ready with
my own version of
crickets III.
