All hail mon462 for noodging me into registering for guitar classes at the Old Town School once more, after a multiyear hiatus where I only seldom touched my instrument, and then only to whizz through very basic accompaniments for songs I already knew how to play. All hail!

So yesterday was the first class of the new session, and I'm taking Guitar Ensemble Skills and Guitar 2-Repertoire (a techniques class). When last I was enrolled, I'd made it as far as 3-Rep, but my hiatus and general rustiness encouraged me to drop back down a level for this first toe-dabbling exercise, and I'm glad I did. I am (reasonably so) rather farther advanced than my classmates who just came out of 2, but I can see that the skills we're going to work this semester are precisely the ones that are scariest/weakest for me: treating my left hand's motions as not just simple presets, but variable, and doing Different Things (picking bass notes, different strum rhythms) with my right hand.

Guitar Ensemble Skills is also shaping up to be one of the most fun classes I've ever taken, as well as being 'useful'. Well, and hard. And encouraging me to practice stuff I've gotten extremely rusty on. Which is good! :-> Ensemble classes in general, at OTS, mean students with a range of instruments in a room working up arrangements to perform songs provided by the teachers (often themed -- there's a Guns'n'Roses ensemble, a Bangles ensemble, a jazz fusion ensemble, etc). Usually, this means 2/3 of the students present play guitar, you're lucky to get a vocalist, bassist, drummer, or Something Else Weird, and many of the teachers have been taken aback by the fact that one of my favorite things in all the world to do is to sing harmony vocals. So you often get six guitars all doing mostly the same rhythm part, with one Really Good guy doing leadlines, and a lot of unison singing.

Not in this class -- lawdamercy, no! And I'm glad of it. Firstly, I'm one of only three people who brought guitars to the class (and the least skilled of the three, which I anticipated), so there's actually a desire for me to learn and perform steady-but-basic rhythm lines. Drat it. Which means I have to actually practice my C#m chords at speed, and so on. However, the teachers are also massively in favor of multipart vocals YAAAAAY. And we have a drummer. And the gal who came to class without an instrument entirely, who said she wanted to primarily sing, turns out to be a classically-trained pianist in her 'other' musical life, so can put nifty keyboard riffs on things to substitute for, say, horn lines in the original artist's arrangement.

Yesterday we worked up a serviceable, really neat arrangement of Paul McCartney's song 'Jet' in an hour and a half -- I can tell you, it's really nice working with pros. :-> Now I just need to get home and practice my fingers off trying to get those barre chords back ... now that I have a shiny gaw-juss (to steal Eric Coleman's pronunciation) guitar with low enough action to make them unpainful.

Oh, and do my math writing assignment before Tuesday, and practice my piano class homework before Monday, and ... did I mention next week is the last week of classes at HWC? Argh. :-> Still, good argh.