BarneyPiccolo

You can pick up used trumpets on Facebook Marketplace for cheap. The most common mutes are straight and cup mutes.

Jazz players use them a lot. It gives them a cool, quiet, strained sound. Miles Davis used a straight mute often. So did Dizzy.

Get a cheap trumpet, stick a mute in it, and stand in your closet door, and play into your clothes.

Yeah, the acoustic guitar is an amazing instrument. Beethoven loved the guitar, and called it a portable orchestra.

I have a degree in Music History, so like you, I like to do my own arrangements. Sure, the first draft is basically just the chords with the tune on top, but I always try to add little ornaments, deedly-dees, walking bass lines up and down, cool little turnarounds, imaginative intros and endings, etc., I usually try to arrange at least one passage that is beyond my ability, and then torture myself for a few months to master it. That's how I know I've improved. I look over all my arrangements, and all the hard passages that I wrote, and then conquered, and I have actual proof of my improvement. That's satisfying, right there.

That dark velvetiness that violas have is gorgeous. It is too bad that not much is written for it, but at least you can adapt violin or cello music.

I grew up playing trombone. There's no good music for that either, and you can't even adapt other stuff well to it. I never enjoyed playing it back then, even though I love music. Today, I'm a guitarist. Much more satisfying than trombone.

Can you imagine having to shift individual frets, untying and retying them to get the instrument in tune?

What a pain in the ass. No wonder they went extinct.

While they look similar, the violin and the gamba family are separate branches, sort of musical cousins.

Of all the stringed instruments, the upright string bass is the closest in shape to the gamba family, and is technically evolved from that. The shoulders on a violin, viola, or cello, come straight out from the neck, while the shoulders on a string bass slope down. That's a typical characteristic difference in shape between violins and gambas.

I was a classical musician, so I really babied my ears over the years. Now I'm old, and I have a touch of tinnitus that just registers as background noise and is easy to filter out, so my hearing is still excellent.

I love the mandolin, and I'd love to play one regularly, but they are just too small for my fingers. I play guitar, and that's enough to keep me occupied for life.

I was in a great band as a kid, and on our way to gigs, one of our guitarists would strum the mandolin from the shotgun seat, and we'd all sing along, and practice our harmonies. I remember doing that, smiling wide, and thinking it was the most fun I'd ever had in my young life. Easily one of my favorite teen memories.

When I was a teen, music was how I made money. When my friends were flipping burgers or bussing tables, I was playing in multiple bands, and playing 3 or 4 gigs a month. That gave me enough pocket money to take my girl out.

So music and income became tightly linked for a long time. I got a degree in Music History, and worked for record labels for a few decades. Then I got out of music for a couple of decades.

When I took up the guitar again during the pandemic, I had absolutely no intention of performing ever again. I just wanted play for my own entertainment. To a certain extent, I also really wanted to conquer the guitar. I played it as a kid, but I never got very good. It beat me, and that always bothered me.

I've been playing again for 5 years, and I'm getting pretty good. I've far surpassed where I was as a kid, and can credibly call myself an intermediate player. The main thing is that money is no longer involved, I'm just doing it for fun and that took some getting used to. I just do it for love of music, self-satisfaction, and mental health.

Buying all these used guitars is costing me a fortune, though.

Get a mute for your trumpet, and head for the basement. Maybe even build a little insulated chamber to cut down the sound more, or play in a closet. Once you get your chops back and start improving, other people won't mind hearing you.

Yep, grew up playing trombone in band, and string bass in orchestra, and played guitar and electric bass in basement rock bands. I went to a conservatory for college and stopped playing guitar and bass. Got a degree in Music History, went into the classical/jazz music biz for a couple decades, then my own non-music biz for a couple decades, and never played anything for all those years.

Then I was going stir crazy during the pandemic quarantine, going nuts from daytime TV, so in 2020 I took up the electric guitar, and got back to it.

I improved quickly, but about 18 months ago, I got into fingerstyle, and now I'm obsessed. All I ever wanted was to be able to play well enough to get through entire songs, and entertain myself. With finger picking, I can do that. I have a strong music background, so I don't use tabs, I just create my own arrangements.

The result has been amazing for my mental health. I came to realize that I had been operating with a low-grade depression for a long time, maybe most of my life, but playing the guitar has lifted most of that. That's how I knew I had been depressed - when it improved. It had just become my baseline existence.

Favorite things to play? I'm all over the place, from classical tunes, to modern songs. Some of my favorite pieces to play are two songs by Stephen Foster - a lullaby called Slumber My Darling, and a beautiful ballad called Hard Times, Come Again No More, which was Foster's own personal favorite, and the song he used to sing in taverns for free drinks as a broke, degenerate alcoholic.

It's so satisfying to sit on the front porch on a sunny late afternoon, looking out over the pond, and play my own music. If I was a religious person, I'd say it was one of God's greatest gifts.

At least they notice. Nobody around me notices anything. Sometimes I'll play something really nice on my guitar, and I'll ask what those in the room thought, and they all look up from their phones and say, "I don't know, I wasn't really listening."

Well, it was really good, and you missed out, Losers.

I love recorder music. I have degree in Music History, and baroque recorder music is some of my favorite stuff.