Here’s one of the things that I think is so amazing about music. It’s so much deeper and so much more involved than simply playing an instrument and making music that way. Don’t get me wrong, playing an instrument and making music itself is enough, it’s a beautiful thing, it can keep you always challenged and always having something to do and if you don’t yet play an instrument you should pick one up and learn!But, for many musicians if we’ve been doing it for a while, and we really enjoy music, there’s so many other things that we will find ourselves learning and getting into as well. And the great thing about that is, even if perhaps you can’t play an instrument because of illness or injury, there’s so many other things you can do to still explore your musical passion.
I happen to play the trumpet, piano, and saxophone primarily. All of these instruments require two hands and are pretty physically involved. I recently was in a motorcycle accident and suffered multiple fractures in my right hand and arm, my right leg, and two spinal fractures. As you can imagine, playing instruments was not exactly something I was doing right after that accident and definitely not for the last several weeks.
I am thankful for some really important and helpful inventions like the CTS (The Compression Training System) and the PCTS (a smaller pocket sized training system) that allowed me to work on my embouchure and continue to keep my embouchure at that time in a careful way (that’s what we call our oral cavity and mouth muscles that we use to play the trumpet). And there are other things you can do as well, I was able to continue mentally sort of working on my scales going through fingering patterns and so forth, and it’s a great idea always to figure out what we can do over perhaps some of the things that we are not able to do at that time.
But musically, as far as making new music,what I did find myself doing almost as soon as I came home from the hospital, was writing new music arrangements. It’s a simple thing I can do with just my laptop, it’s something I enjoy doing, it’s something that’s fulfilling, and I’ve already pumped out three arrangements in this short time and I’m working on a fourth!
Here’s where I think this gets really important in considering how you learn music and your approach to learning music. If your approach to learning music is limited only to really playing an instrument, while that’s a wonderful thing, and you could be really good at that instrument, you definitely could find yourself extremely limited either because of illness, injury, or even age at some point in your life.
On the other hand, if your approach to learning music includes learning theory, learning concepts of composition and arranging, transcription, production, songwriting, these are all things that you could accomplish very easily even if you’re extremely limited physically. And of course all those things you can do when you’re well and not limited physically and they can enhance your musical experience and bring you all kinds of joy and even potentially if you desire so the opportunity to share music with others and even make commercially successful music and and it source of income as well on it.
So, is your musical learning experience including things that would allow you to do something even when you’re limited physically? If so, maybe it’s a good time to start making some goals that would broaden your musical abilities.
