instruments

These five hundred words may be the toughest ones yet. The reason for this is mainly because this may have been one of the least memorable weeks of the school year only because nothing seemed to happen. I just had a lot of work, chilled around my room all weekend, and didn’t even have my tutoring this week because I had to reschedule due to an interview.

            I can talk about my main hobby, and the one thing I find myself doing in all my free time: playing the guitar or bass.

            I decided to bring my second guitar back to college instead of the typical red one. This one is sky blue and is typically made for metal music. Although that is far from the genre I play, the guitar still creates beautiful tones in any form of music. One thing that is especially unique about this instrument is that it has a Floyd Rose bridge. The bridge of the guitar is the small metal piece at the end of the strings on the body through which the strings go and send the vibrations into the electronics to send the sounds to the amplifier. Whammy bars typically will push the bridge slightly forward or back to tighten or loosen the tension on the strings lowering or raising the pitch of the sound. A Floyd Rose bridge is a bridge specialized for awesome whammy bar tricks. It can bend loosen the strings so much that they hand like floss, or tighten them so much that they can actually snap.

            The main reason I am keeping this guitar here instead of the typical red Stratocaster is that it is more unique. If someone were to ask me what kind of guitar do I use, saying I use a strat is pretty cool, but having your own classic guitar is so much cooler to say. If one day, through some extremely unlikely luck, I become a famous musician, I will be famously associated with the Schecter Super Shredder, like Van Halen’s custom Frankenstein guitar or (my favorite) Rivers Cuomo’s sky blue strat.

            Next I must explain my bass because it is relatively new. Exactly one month ago, I got this bass for my birthday. I got this instrument despite being extremely new to playing it because I’ve somewhat taken that role amongst my jam friends and so I’m embracing the role of a bassist. I’ve also been spending so much time playing it that I am actually seeing remarkably fast improvements and I am enjoying myself so much in the process. Something about the richness of a bass and the grooviness of fingerpicking instead of hard picking is extremely thrilling and I keep finding myself coming back to it.

            The bass I got is called a jazz bass, yet I have never played that genre and I don’t plan on it. It’s a bright shade of yellow, so I decided to call it the Banana. On it I have a colorful strap that I don’t know if I could trust because I’ve seen it slip off a couple times.