It is often said that music is the restless companion that never leaves your side. While I fully embrace this romantic notion, I think that this attachment blooms with personal experience, and a symbiosis between music and one’s personality, as opposed to it being an inherent trait of a melody.

When the time came for me to grow, during the twilight of my grade school education, my best friend at the time started showing an inclination for emo and pop-punk music. Needless to say, me, being completely clueless, and frankly a little apathetic in the music department, started adopting these genres as my favorites. It made me actively seek out and discover new artists and peripheral facts about the social framework that surrounds these scenes. Quickly I embraced bands such as Green Day, Fall Out Boy, and Blink 182 as my favorites and started looking at music as a viable activity to promote escapism and learning about a whole different culture I had not been exposed to before. However, it wouldn’t be until the early days of middle school where Guitar Hero, a videogame that simulates the feel of being a note-shredding machine by giving you a plastic guitar-shaped-controller, would push me over the edge and prompt my interest in learning how to play an actual instrument.

My parents were glad I was showing interest in activities outside my school curriculum, so they decided private lessons where a good vessel for me to fulfill my delirious rock-n-roll dreams. Despite having different instructors, I can say that I learned quite a few interesting ways of looking at music through each of their individual interpretations of it. I also learned that there are different ways to learn about music; I had instructors that were very rigid in teaching the sound foundations of musical orientation, such as note values, different keys, sounds, different tempos and overall learning how to read music. I also had instructors that were very basic, yet deep in their teachings. In some occasions they could just throw out a tablature teach us how to read it, give us an hour to practice and expect us to play the song or exercise by the end of the lesson. All these processes and distinct experiences taught me fact that there are different paths to reach a certain outcome and the value of practice and perseverance.

It is safe to say that since those wee days in elementary school I have gone through different phases of music taste. Starting out with the emo scene, transitioning into the metal scene, leading me to where I am now, more accepting of all types of music and appreciative of the medium as a whole. I think most artists have something interesting to say, which is what leads them to pursue the reaching of an audience through melodies.