Guitar

My introduction to guitar was slightly backwards. I started on a guitarrón, the big bass guitar from mariachi bands, and it’s fretless.

Most guitars divide the neck into neat little boxes: put your finger behind this fret and you get this note. Take the frets away and nothing guarantees your finger is in the right place. Move a millimetre and the note changes, so you have to listen for where the sound is instead of trusting where your hand thinks it should go.

I think about that outside music too. Lines someone else has drawn make things easier, but it’s easy to stop questioning them. Without them you get more freedom, and many more chances to sound terrible.

These days I mostly play acoustic guitar, which is far more conventional, and I’m not very good. There’s no goal beyond picking it up, learning something and getting the noise coming out of it a little closer to the one in my head.