The Music Player Who Can't Sing

Do you also find solace in music?

I do.

Growing up, we all must have indulged in music: listening to the radio, writing down lines of songs on our notepads, and idolizing artists and bands.

I did and I still do.

I have never learned how to sing. Or simply, I can’t sing. I’m tone deaf when it comes to singing.

I learned how to play the guitar when I was 12. I’m not the best at guitar playing either but I have played a dozen songs and have performed as a bass guitarist in quite a handful of bands in college. When I was 17, I even tried to learn a bit of drumset playing.

Again, I have a very bad singing voice but since I know how to play the guitar, I have to sing a bit to the songs I am playing and I don’t care what other people say because I love the music that I play.

I love music and I always cherish it. The first time I got hooked to music, I heard it through my father’s cassette tape player. It wasn’t easy listening to songs in a cassette. The sound is recorded in analog format and the only way to jump forward or backwards is to wind the tape reel. Sounds fun and tedious, huh?!

It was when I was in grade school that we first owned a CD player. Note that back then, a CD player could not play VCD or DVD so we had at least three different equipment to play music and/or videos! I loved album CDs. I collected CDs of my favorite artists and I enjoyed reading the piece of paper that comes with it. Some albums included song lyrics while others just had random trivia and photos of the bands.

Another source of music that I will eternally love, but am quite sad that I don’t own one now, is the radio! There is an element of suspense that only the radio can provide. You don’t know what song is gonna play next unless the DJ says so. I spent one summer in 2006 as a junior jock in a local radio station and I say, getting to control what plays on the radio was one of the best things I have ever done in my life.

We are in such a fast-paced technological world and it wasn’t long until Ipods and MP3 players slowly killed cassettes and CDs. Technology is even trying to replace our guitars and drumsets with synthesized and simulated instruments. The Buggles said before, “Video killed the radio star”, and I believed this many years ago. Now, I simply say, technology killed all our natural and organic music.

Even songwriting is fading away. Try to look up the words for Don McLean’s American Pie or The Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody and put them side by side to Lil Pump’s Gucci Gang. I’ll let you be the judge of that. I’m sure you get my point.

I love my 90s music and I prefer to keep it that way. I love my thirteen year old guitar named “Axe” and we will keep our old school ways for as long as we can.

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All photos are owned by the writer.

Keep rocking!

Cheers,
@xaydtrips