Author Archives: billtoner1960

Getting some culture. Better late than never

Posted on by
1

Mark the calendar, on February 10th, 2013 I attended a dress rehearsal of the Oregon Symphony performing Beethoven’s 9th at the Arlene Schnitzer concert hall in Portland, OR.

This was actually my wife’s idea and it didn’t take me long to agree as the only other plans I had in mind were to stay home and work on Cat Scratch Fever for my new band project.  Tough call, but the Symphony won out.

I’ve benefited tremendously in just trusting my wife’s judgement and playing the dumb engineer.  Not a difficult strategy to follow at all.  She’s clearly more intelligent than I.  All you have to do is look at our Words With Friends outcomes.  She waxes my ass on a pretty regular basis.  Clean’s house.  Not a challenge.  Kids play for her, the crossword puzzle whiz that she is.

So when it comes to our social agenda, I just sit back and enjoy the ride.  It’s been working well.

The level of talent is simply mind-boggling.  I like to call myself a guitar player.  I am not.  Though I’ve played in 4 different bands over the past 12 years, logged well over 100 gigs, a musician I am not.  This is what I was expecting to discover today and I was not disappointed.  You see, the difference between real musicians and hacks like myself is, they don’t make this little things called mistakes.  They play a piece from beginning to end and hit every note right on key, with the perfect rhythm with the perfect level of intensity.  What’s even more humbling is that you could put a brand new piece of music in front of these musicians and they could sight read it and probably play it to perfection within the first 2 attempts.  That my friends, is a musician.  What we’ve been doing is having a good time making some noise that resembles familiar sounds.  It’s great fun, and it’s been a good ride, but I am far from being ready to call myself a musician.

I can only imagine what it must be like to set a goal to get to this level of talent.  The level of dedication is beyond anything I’ll ever be capable of or have time for if I did possess the skill set.

Awesome, humbling experience at the Oregon Symphony today.  I’m not sure if I should go down and practice my piano and guitar pieces some more or else put up a for sale sign on all the gear.

Let’s get this blog started…

Posted on by
Reply

So I finally took the plunge and started a blog.  I love to write pen my thoughts from time to time.

It’s hard to say exactly what the categories will end up being, but I suspect the main topics will be about Politics, Religion, Music, Sports, Writing, Techie Topics like Perl and Software Development as well as Life Experiences / other Observations.

I’ve always considered myself sort of a Jack of all Trades, master of none.  That’s been one of my problems, frankly.  I can never seem to focus on one thing long enough to get truly good at it and I envy people who can.   As soon as I say “okay, I’m going to make Music my main focus”, the next thing I know College Football season rolls around and I’m completely distracted from keeping with the plan of attack and spending 2-3 hours a day trying to get solid as a musician.  Someone once told me that you have to put about 2,000 hours into something to get really good at it.  That sounds about right.  I’ve probably got 1,000 hours into about 6 different things, hence, Jack of all trades, master of none.

Oh well.  I’m enjoying life a great deal and reckoned a blog my help me capture some thoughts and observations.  If nothing else, maybe it’ll be good therapy for me to have this venting outlet, or maybe my kids can re-read some of these thoughts long after I’m gone and get a true sense of who Dad really was, whacky guy that he is sometimes.