My lockdown guitar lessons came with bonus life lessons

Learning guitar: More infuriating than this photo makes it look. Photo Alex Burton

Things started, as they typically do, at The Warehouse, where, two days before lockdown, I attempted to panic-buy a guitar. When they didn't have any, I panic-drove to Bungalow Bill's, which was closed, then on to The Rockshop, where guitars are not as cheap as ambition. That night, I found some $45 models on Trade Me. The brand, Irin, was not easy to find reviews for online, but its marketing collateral was astonishing:

"A guitar, the six Golden strings, you can be full of youthful breath. The light melody, playing the relaxing music space, can express the joy and sorrow, and can cultivate the solemn and graceful charm of the temperament. The beautiful tone and the natural and unrestrained playing can add its personal charm to the love of the young people."

That sounded bad, but I wasn't in a position to be taking either the moral or financial high ground, so the next morning, I drove to an unappealing warehouse in Penrose, and used payWave to buy two Irins: one for me, one for Zanna. At home, I opened the box and pulled one out. The body was adorned with two images. The first was a guy in silver silhouette, holding a guitar, leaping, legs bent behind him, back arched, head back, whaling on the six golden strings. Written over him were the words: "Music is passionate art." The second image depicted a band, also in silhouette. On the bass drum was an image of an electric guitar, upright, with flames either side. Beneath were the words: "Music is everiwhere." [sic]

I strummed it. It sounded like a guitar. I tried to tune it using an online tuning app, but, having no idea what I was doing, I kept turning the tuning peg until the string broke.

"I broke a string on one of the guitars," I told Zanna later.
"You broke a string on your guitar," she said. "My one's fine."

The idea of learning guitar had been attractive to me as a teenager for sexual reasons, but I had always thought I was not talented enough, not musical enough. Now I know none of that matters, I feel disappointed for my teenage self, so sad and pathetic, spending all that beautiful bowl-cut, acne-scarred youth playing Civilization and ET's Rugby League on the Amiga 500.

The day I bought the guitars, I panic-signed for three free months' access to Fender Play, an online tuition app guided by non-threatening, boringly dressed, well-spoken people who show you how to play, and how to read chord charts and tablature. On the second day of lessons, just after teaching basic finger techniques, the app taught me the riff to the Rolling Stones' (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction. This interspersal of song lessons with guitar fundamentals is key to the pedagogy of the Fender Play app. Every few lessons, they break off from scales or chords to teach well-known songs to help you feel like all the discomfort and frustration is worth it. It's one thing to understand the psychological manipulation embedded in this and another to be above it. I was proud of mastering Satisfaction and, a couple of days later, interrupted a Zoom conversation with friends to play it while they looked on, astonished.

I like having music in the house. I like that my children keep picking up the guitar and strumming it annoyingly. Growing up, there was no music in my house and I resent that and I resent the possibilities its absence removed for me. Over the past month, Zanna and I have been talking about the idea of one day forming a family band. Clara and Tallulah both want to learn the piano and Casper says he wants to learn drums, although I don't think he knows what they are.

The words we use to describe life help shape the way we perceive it: "Lockdown", "Restrictions", "Isolation": These all imply something taken away, but fail to indicate something given: the opening of space and time to undertake the type of things we would typically neglect because we're spending Saturday afternoons at The Warehouse Sylvia Park.

Don't practice on the balcony. Photo / Alex Burton

The idea that prior to lockdown we were living lives of freedom is a fool's notion. There are lots of places we couldn't go and things we couldn't do before - restricted by lack of money, social norms, beliefs, physical limitations, gravity, the law, and the needs and desires of the people in our lives.

The ability to play music is embodied possibility - possibility rendered physical. How about this: one night you're at a terrible party, bored and anxious, when you see a guitar in the corner. You pick it up and start to play U2's 1991 hit One. Slowly, inexorably, the party stops and turns to you. You build to the chorus, at which point you close your eyes and open to the unmediated human connection of 50 people singing along to the music emerging from you. Partygoers weep openly at the way the moment evokes memories of what their lives were and could have been, the possibilities missed. When you finish, you stand, laugh self-deprecatingly and say, as you pull your pants out of your bum, "Sorry it was a bit pitchy there in the middle - my 'G string' was a bit sharp." The room is yours: No one can resist the trinity of musical pathos, dad humour and false humility. You leave before anyone can ruin the moment by talking to you.

By Friday afternoon, I could do Satisfaction. Two days later, I had mastered two one-finger chords. I could feel my talent growing and with it my power and potency. I could feel the guitar becoming part of me, filling the musical-sized emptiness that had always existed within me.

Early the next week, I learned my first two full chords, requiring the use of multiple fingers to hold strings across multiple frets. The key to successful chords is precise finger placement, because touching adjacent strings mutes their sound. It didn't matter how much I practised, I couldn't stop the muting. I tried all sorts of things. I asked Zanna if she could do it, which she could. That made me feel worse. I read articles, watched YouTube videos, asked for advice on the Fender Play Facebook community. A couple of people said they were having the same problem, a couple more said thumb placement, one said new muscles need time to develop and a couple of others said practise. My point is, Facebook sucks.

Over the next few days I practised and I practised, but nothing made any difference. I would not give up and nor, it seemed, would I ever stop muting strings. Adjusting my fingers to fix one problem just created new ones. I tried new thumb positions, wrist positions, finger positions, new postures, different guitar angles. After the success of my first few lessons, I had envisaged ending this story by making Zanna cry with a personalised rendition of Wonderwall, but now it looked like I wasn't even going to be able to play her House of the Rising Sun.

During this dark night of the soul, I had my first guitar dream, in which I had an epiphany about how to correctly play chords: I discovered that the key was to roll each of my fingers either up or down on each string. I was, like, "Why didn't I think of that before?" and I woke up with the same terrible excitement I used to get from dreams I'd made the All Blacks, followed by the same great crushing of reality.

A relaxing moment, with guitar. Photo / Alex Burton

It was only a week since I'd first picked up a guitar, but already I had arrived at the place anyone trying to acquire a new skill eventually reaches: hopelessness. I told Zanna I was going to quit. She became angry and said, "I don't want to hear you saying that in front of our children."

I pushed on, but not relentlessly, not proudly or stoically. There was nothing admirable about the way I pushed on. I pushed on lamely and resentfully, begrudgingly and whiningly. Each time I picked up the guitar, I rolled my eyes inwardly, full of self-loathing. I hated my lack of ability, my graceless ambition, my misplaced confidence, my lack of persistence, my bad attitude and my self-loathing.

Zanna, after listening to my lame mewlings for a couple of weeks, told me I should move on to the next lesson. I griped and whined like a child, saying I couldn't, that I had to master the chords first, even though she had just been repeating advice I had given her a couple of weeks earlier. Eventually, because I could see no other road forward, I relented and moved on. The change was immediate. I could feel it in my brain. By focusing on something different, my thinking immediately shifted out of its state of relentless rumination and became reinvigorated.

The desire for progress is a fundamental human need, driven - I assume - by fear of death: the ultimate stillness. I wasn't mastering everything I tried, but nor was I staying still. I moved past the basics of chords and the transitions I hadn't yet mastered and kept going, arriving eventually at a tutorial for the ZZ Top song Tush. I practised it for a couple of days, but couldn't get close to mastering its rapid chord progressions, even at half speed. No matter: I kept going.

The next lesson was the riff to Nirvana's Come As You Are, one of the biggest hits from the seminal 90s album Nevermind, the song that sold a million Kurt Cobain cardigans. Where Tush had involved chords and strumming, Come As You Are required only picking. The challenge was in moving the symbols from my screen's tab chart into the actions of my fingers, and from there into my embodied memory. I watched myself, interested, as the individual notes of the riff slowly congealed in me, like the making of a dough, first into short memorable sequential chunks, then larger chunks and eventually, after a couple of hours, into a coherent whole. The mastery felt like something I could keep, like a small gift or a surprisingly delicious free sample from an upmarket grocery outlet.

Once I had the riff learned well enough that I was able to repeat it three or four times without stopping, I discovered that was the point at which the circular pattern of the repeated notes would come unmoored from the linear structure in which my mind tried to arrange them, leaving my fingers to find their own way. This, I assume, is the place musicians live: their bodies detaching from their rational brains, becoming one with the sound they're creating, fully absorbed in the current of life.

I am not a musician. I felt dizzy and a little faint. The strings and the guitar itself began to look weird, like they were coming apart. I didn't trust my fingers to know where they were going, and couldn't or wouldn't free them to find their own way. I hit bung note after bung note, had to keep starting again. The tip of my middle finger was starting to hurt.

I put the guitar down. I would pick it up again tomorrow, and probably the next day and maybe for an undetermined number of days into the future: I had come far enough to know this wasn't an ending, but I couldn't yet say for sure to what extent it was a beginning.