And you thought the Goose was weird...

I have been putting a lot of work into the guitar the last few weeks. Went out and bought a little practice amp, been going through some self-teaching books...funny story about that. Somewhere around 25 years ago, give or take a couple of years, I was being taught guitar by my Dad, and no surprise here, one of my great regrets in life was not sticking with it. 

Ha ha what an amusing anecdote. Oh, wait...I am not done yet. 

I prefer to play notes as opposed to chords. For better than two decades I have at random times picked up a guitar and ran the scales. I would also play the one chord I remembered and the song 500 Miles. 

So in working my way through this book, it was actually going pretty quick. In roughly one hour, I re-learned two strings. I can sight-read them and float between the two pretty quickly. I have always found it an awkward string so at this point I slowed my progress a bit, but still a one hour session was sufficient to be playing it smoothly enough for my taste. Fourth string, no problem. 

Fifth string, no problem. 

Sixth string...problem. BIG problem. I suddenly could not remember which notes were 5th string and which were 6th. My sight-reading failed me completely. No matter how slowly I played it, could not remember. SO I decided to play back through the various strings. 

And on the second string was everyone's favorite, Ode to Joy. I wasn't paying a lot of attention since it was just a refresher/work off steam thing until I noticed I was playing notes that weren't on the page...notes I remembered from 25 years ago. 

And I still can't sight-read the 6th and 5th strings together. 

I can remember stuff from 25 years ago but not 2 minutes? I must be getting old.