![]() ![]() I’ve booked enough studio time for her to record two songs. Later, when I visit the studio in person, a pair of foxes dart across the yard, zigging and zagging between the trees. It’s in the basement of a house and the studio overlooks a wooded yard that slopes down to a quiet stream. I research local recording studios in the Washington, D.C. She’s approaching an important milestone that I appreciate more than ever. It’s been almost two years since she began playing. She’s better than me but I’m starting to keep up. She has been recording and posting YouTube videos of covers and we’ve performed over Zoom a few times for family and friends. I can play the guitar, and that’s good enough for me!) (Which isn’t to say I’m good -but, somehow, a year in lockdown has given me time to focus on the hobby, and it’s as fun as it is therapeutic. Not only have I learned to play, but I’m better than I ever thought I could be. Malika’s gear acquisition syndrome has transferred to me but neither Pfizer nor Moderna have a vaccine to stop you from buying guitars online. I’m starting to resemble the late-era Beatles. It’s May 2021 and I’ve let my beard grow long. I bought one, failed at the C chord, and quickly gave up.īut the bug had come for me again, and this time I was going to take a serious stab at the instrument: I would pay for in-person lessons.īesides, it wasn’t like there was a global health pandemic about to shut us down for nearly two years, right? A few years later, after watching a singer-songwriter at Summerfest’s Tiki stage, I thought an acoustic guitar might be the way to go. I sold it to a friend in college and moved on. I was gifted an electric guitar in high school but discovered that I enjoyed carrying it around more than I enjoyed playing it. How many times had I started to learn the guitar and quit? “Maybe I should take guitar lessons again,” I said. It’s like magic, the way their fingers move across the fretboard to find a perfect collection of complementary notes. I’ve always loved music stores: the smell of humidified air and the tonewood of the acoustic guitars hanging from the walls, someone perched on a stool and noodling on an electric guitar through a cranked amplifier. It was a quality instrument and her commitment to the instrument deepened. We went to our local music store, Foxes, and bought a used professional ukulele that had come from one of the salespeople’s personal collection. She’d gone deep down the rabbit hole of YouTube videos and was convinced she needed a second ukulele. She quickly went to work learning a few songs.īy January 2020 Malika was beginning to suffer from a chronic condition known in the music community as gear acquisition syndrome. The next month, for her birthday, I bought her a concert ukulele kit online, complete with a case, strap, and tuner. We were video chatting on WhatsApp when she told me that she’d picked up a ukulele in the hostel’s music wall and had started to teach herself some basic chords. She’d booked a private room in a youth hostel to meet backpackers as they came and went, and spent a lot of time in the common room with its many pets, including a tortoise. She took a boat cruise on the Li River and toured the city between downpours. It was the beginning of the rainy season-hot and humid with low, threatening clouds. embassy in Beijing, she took a train to Yangshuo to squeeze in a vacation before flying home. During her two-month rotation at the U.S. Malika first broached the idea of wanting a ukulele in 2019.
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