When I was 6 or 7 years old, my parents said to me, “Casey, which instrument would you rather play? The piano, the guitar, or the flute? We’re going to sign you up for lessons.” I knew right away that I didn’t want to play the flute (sorry flutists), but I was torn between guitar and piano. After a long deliberation session in my elementary head, I decided on piano.

I took lessons for 8 years (or something like that). I had a teacher I loved, and a teacher I hated, and a teacher I don’t remember at all except that she was ancient and her house was covered in crochet doilies and smelled like mold and cats. She gave me candy, though, so that was cool.

Though I decided ultimately on piano, I was still interested in learning the guitar. In sophomore year, I got a guitar for Christmas and taught myself how to play chords and basic songs. I continue to play pretty much every day, learning songs from tabs and YouTube videos. Little did I know as a wee first grader that music lessons and learning to play instruments would shape my character as much as it did.

Curiosity

I really liked playing piano, but lessons pretty much made practicing a chore. Not wanting to abandon 8 years of work, I decided to explore. I searched the internet and found sheet music for songs I wanted to play. Often times, these arrangements were way harder than the pieces my teacher was assigning me to practice for the next lesson. I pretty much just abandoned the lesson books she gave me for these popular songs that I enjoyed playing, and this kept me interested in playing. (I really should have practiced the lessons, though).

Dedication

When I was learning to play guitar, one of the hardest things for me was the pain, literally. When you haven’t built up callous on your fingertips from playing, the nylon strings cut in and make it incredibly painful to hold a single note, let alone chords. Instead of crying over my blisters and slathering lotion on them, I realized that if I wanted to be able to play guitar, I needed to toughen up and keep with it.

Patience

Just recently, I was playing guitar for the first time since Thanksgiving. I came across a tab (basically sheet music for guitar) for one of my favorite songs. It’s got a lot of fingerpicking, which is more complicated than just strumming chords, and some of the chord changes are hard. I’ve been playing it 3 or 4 times a day, and each day I get a little faster at going from that G7 shape to the C shape. It’s still not perfect, but I know from years of playing that it takes patience as well as practice to get it right.

Responsibility

Lessons were expensive. My guitar was expensive. (My keyboard wasn’t really that expensive because my dad got it cheap from a guy he used to work with, but just go with it). All this money is going towards music, and it would be absolutely foolish to let it go to waste. Even if I wasn’t practicing what my piano teacher gave me, I was still playing. With guitar, I was and am completely self-reliant. I am responsible for my own music education.

Not a single day goes by that I miss piano lessons. I’m serious. But even going a day without playing makes me a little sad. In fact, I’m going to go try and work out that Bob Dylan song.