Mini-blog 2: A personal rant about music and hobbies

Date published: 2024.12.27

🌌 Has the title caught your attention? Well, we promised we were going to talk about our lyre eventually, but I actually really wanted to ramble a bit more in general, so this blog post is gonna be alllll over the place as a proper blog post should be ^_^

So yeah, music! Let’s go *wags tail*

Short backstory time: you might not know it, but we used to play guitar when we were little. Not for a long time, mind you, it was only a couple months – we were too poor to get our own guitar or a proper teacher, so we played on a borrowed guitar and were being taught by our mom’s cousin. Safe to say, the experience was shitty enough that the unpleasant vibes eventually won over our interest in playing music and we quit. There is only so much a person can take.

We were also a member of a church choir. That one took years though, since we didn’t need any special gear for singing, and we even ended up recording an album – I think our mom still has the CD somewhere. I might ask her to find it at some point, maybe…

Either way, eventually it all came to an end. The guitar lessons were the opposite of fun due to the awful conditions, and the choir stopped being an option when we realized we fucking hated Christianity and became a Reddit atheist at heart. So by the time we graduated elementary school we had no more experiences with music other than passively listening to it; there was a time when our mom tried to get us into joining a local orchestra, but for some goddamn reason they told us to grab some pom-pons and become a majorette, and like, that was not cool, so we went ‘lol, bye’. (Or something along those lines. Idk, I was dormant at the time. I just know we went there once and never came back.)

(You might now ask: Aleks, but did you not have a music band at school? Uh, no – we live in a shithole, remember?)

Either way, we had other interests that we focused on, some of which also eventually disappeared one by one as we got older, swallowed by the monstrosity that is dissociation. We’ve only been attempting to regain interest in things in the past few years; our teens were a period of a slow decline of hobbies and passions, meanwhile our early twenties have been – for now – a time of slowly digging up abandoned stuff and trying to figure out what the fuck to do with it. It’s easy not to care, you know. It’s addictive. I’m just as guilty for going dormant for almost a decade and taking everything I cared about with me, as the others who stuck around but more or less consciously stopped giving a shit. That is to say: none of us are to blame and honestly, fuck being a teenager, especially a mentally ill one. That is also to say: I have no idea which things should stay dead and which should be resurrected, since we kind of indiscriminately buried them all.

So what about the music

Good question! A bit over a half a year ago Kordian decided he wanted to try music production. I have no idea what prompted that sudden interest; he just woke up one day and proclaimed that he wanted to make music. But he went about it in a typical extrovert way, which is: he also decided that any hobby he would have to try his hand at alone is lame and boring, so the most important part of preparations was gathering a party.

(Keep in mind that he has always been one of the most frequent fronters, so he absolutely could have a hobby no one else in this head would enjoy. He fucking needed that interaction though.)

So he created a separate channel dedicated to music production in our private system Discord server, sent 2 YouTube tutorials for when he actually wanted to start learning, and then he waited for volunteers. The volunteers showed up, some more hyped up, others more reluctant but willing to put in some work if it meant the others in this head would be happier, and then… Kordian began fusing into Iri and kind of had to put any other complicated matters on hold.

As of writing this, we still haven’t touched any DAW. Though some plans are starting to sprout again – and hopefully now that the party is already assembled, it will be easier for those interested to just sit down and get to work.

As a bonus, here’s Ewelina’s extroverted ass being on Kordian’s wavelength:

Anyways, producing electronic music hasn’t worked out (for now). We put all music matters on hold for a couple months, and then…

The lyre

I’ll be humble and say it outright that the lyre was my idea. Not for me though. I don’t remember who made me think we needed it, but I struck gold, because some of us sure love it. And I’m happy!!! I like it too ^_^ I’m not super good at playing it at all but it’s still fun. Also, one can’t be the best at everything 🙄 I’m ok with being the system’s artist and poet, I don’t need to be their most talented musician too… ← denial

Finding the best lyre was so goddamn difficult that I switched out from the stress. I don’t even remember who ended up ordering the instrument after all, I was so out of it lol. But it was one of the lyres I found before I noped out mentally!

It’s this exact model:

16 strings, deer head, mahogany wood. We chose this one mostly because the more popular shape of modern lyres kind of sucks visually (personal opinion). We thought that’d turn out to be a disadvantage as the deer head lyres have less space between the strings which makes playing a bit more difficult, but we ended up being extremely glad we chose this one, because it’s symmetrical and can be comfortably played from both sides, which in turn is important because…

We found out we’re very left-handed when it comes to playing instruments. Lol

(To be clear, our entire life we’ve been doing everything right-handed. I have NO idea why our right hand does everything else just fine but becomes utterly useless while playing instruments.)

It’s funny as hell, but I’m glad we realized that quite fast, otherwise we’d be super frustrated with our struggle and lack of progress in learning. The moment we switched to playing with our left hand as the main one & using the right one only to support it, everything became so much easier.

Which is fun! Seriously! If we hadn’t given this hobby another chance we still would not be aware that we’re cross-dominant!

You might ask, okay, why a lyre specifically? I don’t really know why I thought of it, only that I immediately knew it was the right choice. But I can tell you what we like about it: we like that it’s still on the smaller side, which makes it easier to transport; we like that it’s quite simple, because there’s weird beauty in being limited while improvising (honestly, sometimes we think the idea of getting a 7 string lyre sounds great too to limit our range even further – but not anytime soon); and we like that it’s pretty quiet of an instrument. All of these could be downsides for you, but they’re undeniably the reason why we’ve fallen in love with it.

I think, you know, we didn’t realize how much we missed the physical sensation of actually holding an instrument. We have had a kalimba for some time now, sure, but it’s small and we treat it more like a stim toy than a proper instrument (not to say that it isn’t one, to be clear – I love songs played on kalimba, it’s just not an instrument we take seriously); we also have a tin whistle lying somewhere that we still don’t know how to play properly. (One day, though. I promise. Just not today.) They’re both small though. The lyre is the size of my laptop, and when I hold it I can put it close to my body, and that makes playing it so much more… intimate. Does this make sense? Idk. Either way, we missed the feeling.

I kind of suck at playing lyre, Kas is kind of talented at it, Len is kind of extremely talented at it but keeps claiming they don’t give a fuck, one of the anonymous Echo headmates is even more talented at it and extremely attached to the instrument already, Aria and Teo are not that talented but are still good because of the privilege of having more than 2 braincells bouncing around their heads at the same time, and Iri is just kind of happy to be there. Idk.

Anyway, we’re going to give guitar another go next year. We’ll buy one we like this time instead of borrowing a shitty one from a friend of a friend (even though obviously it’s gonna be on the cheaper side), and we’ll see if we enjoy it. We’ll also try to play it left-handed this time too lol 😭 That might have also influenced our decision to quit…

Are we going to stick to music? Probably, in one way or the other. We’re not big fans of playing covers of songs, so we’re striving to get better at improvising on the lyre. Would love to start writing our own music, but a lyre is probably too simple for more ambitious projects, so we shall see with the guitar. And yeah, I’d love to see Iri pick some goddamn DAW already and actually try it out. Either way, it’s been fun this far and we’ve been able to keep up the energy for long enough for me to believe the interest’s not gonna suddenly disappear. Which is nice.

(Although dear god, we have to learn music theory. Fucked up how if you want to start playing music you gotta learn theory and how if you want to start drawing you gotta learn theory, and—)