on playing guitar in a broken home

 i've been thinking a lot about this recently, and I don't know that I even want to share this as I type it. I don't want to make an attention seeking spectacle of my pain, but I think it's interesting and I feel like letting this stuff stay hidden is bad, etc. I'm just gonna write it

 when I started playing guitar I started playing in my abusive childhood home. My dad was an asshole, super respected, high status, no one could see or cared to see how poorly he was treating me and often enabled him. All that sorta sad stuff, I'll spare u details beyond that, just my parents were dangerous so I listened for them

 and listening for a threat, in a sort of combat style scenario, a traumatic environment, dramatically alters your playing as you would expect. Even now I get quiet when i hear a thud, surveilling my safe environment for threats that aren't there anymore. It makes playing for people very strange but I'm not interested in talking about that.

 I just find that my style I think is rooted in this hyper-vigilant trauma escape mechanism where it let me soothe while still allowing me to feel safe. 

 some observations and theories: 

- I play fast, so fast I find myself having a hard time expressing the "real" thoughts I have while I'm playing in language, it's all so close to straight feeling, and the closer you get to that core pre-linguistic formation the better my playing is i find. being in the "zone" etc, but when I'm going slow I start to surveil my environment because I can hear it, neighbors shuffling, the fridge humming, my mind starts to wander back into hypervigilance which is exhausting and just not fun etc. I'm often jealous of american primitive players who are so skilled in slow melodic sections recently. But the gist of this is it is a meditative state that lets me escape negative thoughts, but this also makes it a trigger for those negative thoughts so I aggressively pursue that meditative state with speed

- I play fingerstyle, which allows for a lot of control over complex rhythms, this would let me break into irregular time signatures when i wanted to listen to a noise without alerting people that i was listening because the sound didn't stop

 - dynamic control was one of the things that came most naturally to me

- I focus on rhythm over melody, melody often made me feel unsafe e.g. playing a sad song let my parents know i was sad but a polyrhythm doesn't really communicate on that level. I think this also reflects that i was listening for thuds and murmurs more than the melody of my instrument while playing

 

ok,

I wanted to get that out there i guess, for myself a little bit, a record of it all, I'm doing much better re: the broken home now and I don't want you to be concerned or sad about something that's over

on rhtyhm !!

 i've been uninterested in melody recently or not uninterested but found myself less concerned with melody while playing. this is in part mastery, it becomes more subconscious as i move on i find. and i was kind of stoned sitting here like that feels weird. and what feels weird is the difference between how i process melody while playing and rhythm

 i feel like i have deprioritized melody to make room for more thinking about rhythm while i play. melody is a higher level thought than rhythm. You have 12 notes but every moment is an infinitely small point on a line to hit that note, as in our system of harmony is more of a path that you follow but rhythm are the individual steps you take. melody is usually a second order thought rhythm a first

 as in

 when i play there are some things that happen automatically, without language, but melody happens at the exact moment those things become legible, rhythm is almost always an impulse to me, i never count, but i do think what do i harmonize next. i nod my head to the rhythm in the pocket, never the melody.

 when people talk about music i think of it often as layers of dialectics almost

it starts with you. your internal self and body

then it manifests in the physicality of the instrument

then those manifest a series of higher order layers for you to merge thought yourself and the instrument

and in that layer you have melody, rhythm, dissonance, whatever, all these components

and they stack too

but the very first layer beyond the body and instrument is rhythm and without that the link to your self and feeling is gone, it doesn't matter how beautiful the harmonies you have are, the music becomes sterile

 not that melody can't be beautiful, it's just not the bedrock ykwim