Crazy Train

Tom Lehrer once commented on people who make you really look at how little you've done with your life by saying, 'When Mozart was my age, he'd been dead for nearly two years...'

Lest Tom feel unaccomplished, he's probably a bigger figure in my life than Mozart. I dig Mozart, maybe even love him, but could he have done a Viener Schnitzel Waltz? Case closed.



Anyway, what with the band and all, I've been practicing guitar with a decidedly rock & roll bias for the first time, in something like 23 years. And in trying to recover some of what I've lost (almost everything) I've discovered a quaint non-profit cottage industry of YouTube guitar lessons.

Time was when this kind of stuff cost you upwards of $30 a half hour. I transcribed stuff like this for students when I was as young as the kid on the toilet, here. But I didn't give it away on the internet, I parsed it out in weekly lessons.



Now, on the flip side, with all the lessons and 'tabs*' out on the 'net, you can't scream at your teacher when they get it way, way wrong. Which happens a lot.

So anyway, in the process of trying to learn a song I once (sort of) knew, and haven't even convinced my band-mates to play, I found this charming lass playing Crazy Train on violin. Even went to the trouble to multi-track and cover both the overdubbed guitar stuff and the vocals. I am in awe: she has learned details on violin I was too lazy to learn on guitar back when this was a 33 rpm activity.

If I could claim Mozart an unfair comparison (I've outlived him, so far, by over three years), what of this chick who's probably way younger than me?



I have a standing marriage proposal to my friend Julie, but I'll also make one to tomatomedia, whoever she is. I know, you shouldn't propose to multiple people unless you're a Mormon Fundamentalist or something, but it's not like either one will ever take me up on it.

*I hate tablature. It's a system of notation specifically for guitar which shows finger positions on a fingerboard. If you can bother to learn tabs, you can learn to read music. Which opens up the possibility of reading...I don't know, anything! Written for violin, for piano, for belching monks, whatever. And while real music notation allows for position markings and fingering details, tabs do not really address such issues as rhythm: if you haven't heard someone else play the song, tabs do you no good at all.

I find myself trying to decipher tabs, nonetheless, because as VHS lost out to BetaMax, as government intervention has trumped actual markets, the bad idea has won. Try to find a legit transcription of a rock song online, it's impossible. I found myself, with the above embedded Crazy Train lesson actually translating tabs to sheet music because it makes my head hurt trying to read the tabs...