Do You Hear That Voice In Your Head?

If not, you are no musician.
Epiphany number two with regards to How to Answer that Call ...or as I referred to it, "

Quality Versus Quantity Part Deux"

This will seem to be a fundamental building block, but then...that's my trouble, I can excel at something with no clue as to what I am doing until it hits me and I comprehend the universe. Or that facet of the universe.

I skated through school on my wit and charm. I got through college on my ear alone - well that, and a healthy dose of sucking up at every opportunity. I coasted through engineering school and then a year into the curriculum I understood what the concept of 'ground' meant. I can get along well and figure it out as I go, pretty much.

So recently I had a major musical breakthrough; to answer a call in your mind, rather than expecting every note in your head to be played out loud. Hear half and play the answer.

Here I am a few weeks later and I have been able to fully incorporate this idea. I have embraced it as the glass holding the water, thank you, Mr. Lee.

I hear music everywhere - in white noise - literally everywhere. All it takes is for me to stop and listen for it.

And now, I have a way to release it. I have an outlet. I have a voice.

And sumbitch, but I really like it. I have had a voice in my playing for years, but like a photo of myself, was never satisfied. I knew what I wanted to hear but it eluded me.

Now if I don't have that fragile bird in my hand.

My smile starts within my soul and radiates outward. This is something I was meant to do; to hear and like what I heard.

(Note to self - this does not translate well into money, you know?)

Every musician wants to like his voice, wants it to sound as she or he imagines it. And for most of us, it is a life long quest. Very few are truly happy with the sound they make. Always striving for more, searching...looking to somehow 'fix' what they lack.

They literally don't know how to sing.

Al's one huge piece of advice - "If you can't sing it, you can't play it."

Bert and I are hitch-hiking to the mall in Paramus and he starts humming a bass line...he was the bass player of my youth. I start singing the guitar part. For a good five or ten minutes, we jammed. It was good. It had soul. It sounded nice. The ultimate air guitar (Invented by David West in a boys room circa 1971), and yet there was a real talent in what we did.

Well now I have a way to do just that with my guitar. Play what I hear in my head. Not imagine I can play it, but play it. I sing the call in my head, I play the answer with my fingers. 

Betcha with time, I'll progress passed having to do the call at all. (Maybe I'll also speak the last half of any thought I have?)

For now, I have to map my moves.

I think I am trying to become Rain Man?