While I'm very open-minded to knitting, also consider picking up a musical instrument. Guitar, ukulele, keyboard. There are apps that'll teach you, and it's immensely gratifying -- if like me you obsess over certain songs -- to then be able to work towards playing those.
Knitting has the advantage that you can do it anywhere and at any time without 'bothering' anybody else. Sitting on the bus, watching TV, having a conversation. Most people I know who knit use it almost as a 'fidget toy' that they're subconsciously playing with while simultaneously doing something else. Only looking down every few minutes or so to make sure they're on the right track or to make some change
I recently picked up an analog drum machine - Arturia Drumbrute Impact. I play guitar a little already and picked this up to play some industrial music. It's turned out to be a such a fun device on it's own I'm considering picking up a bass machine, sequencer, and synth.
I can totally zone out creating and tweaking beats on the Drumbrute Impact. I also find it oddly comforting to have on when I'm working.
No better time in history to learn guitar. Amazing online resources, the world is flooded with cheap guitars as well if you’re happy with 2nd hand. There is a technical side to it (tuning, restringing) and plenty of toys, pedals and computer integration to any nerd hearts content. Even if you get stuck at 3 chords it’s amazing the number of pop songs you can suddenly play. Plus if you get past there you still have classical, jazz or whatever super hard path you want to travel to explore.
I sometimes wonder if I'm broken in some way. I bought my first guitar in 1996 (a Mexican Fender Stratocaster) and my last guitar in 2018 (a Gibson SG). I've taken lessons with three different teachers. I've worked through a Hal Leonard book series. I've subscribed to Guitar Tricks for a while then switched to Justin Guitar. I have YouTube playlists a mile long where I try to learn songs. I keep a guitar in my office to help me stop thinking about a problem when I get stuck.
After all this, I don't know any (real) songs from start to finish. The closest I come is playing Nirvana's About a Girl.
I might have some kind of rhythm disability. If I try to play along with a record, I'm almost always lost right away because I start strumming to match the drumming pattern or the vocal rhythms.
It's so frustrating, especially when I see how fast my kids learned to play an instrument. They make it look so easy.
If you're not looking for random person's advice feel free to ignore :-)
> If I try to play along with a record, I'm almost always lost right away because I start strumming to match the drumming pattern or the vocal rhythms.
Are you able to play any strumming patterns (however simple) with just the metronome? Ideally you'd practice this enough that you are able to do it consistently with almost zero thinking, and then check if it has improved your ability to play along with the record.
Another thing that has helped me when learning new strumming patterns (and just rhythm in general) was practicing just the strumming, muting the strings with my left hand instead of playing chords. First with the metronome, then along the record (all without any chords, just muted strings). Give that a try if you feel like it.
You are describing some of the exercises from the Justin Guitar Strumming SOS course. I bought that course and worked my way through it and enjoyed doing it, but it didn't have a big impact.
To answer your metronome question - I can do it for a few minutes but soon something like semantic satiation sets in and I get out of sync. I start to focus on how my arm feels strumming and I can feel the pick vibrating in my fingers and feel the air I'm moving with my arm and I notice the vibration in the guitar body and as my attention moves around, I lose track of the click.
> You are describing some of the exercises from the Justin Guitar Strumming SOS course.
Not surprised that these are in there!
> I can do it for a few minutes but soon something like semantic satiation sets in and I get out of sync
Huh, I never actually did that for more than a few minutes at the time (when just using the metronome), I can imagine it gets boring and attention wanders. I did try to do it frequently (couple of times a day, spread throughout the day), but only for two minutes or so.
Anyway, I thought you might have tried all of that already, considering you took lessons and bought courses, but still wanted to throw it out there. Good luck!
Start in a very slow fashion, like you're teaching kindergardeners songs, and key here is to use both feet to tap, every other beat on each foot, and do it slow as molases, count it 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 while alternating the feet. You can also move the body to that slow rhythm. After some time of doing this you'll realize you don't need to go that slow. Good luck!
Do you have any recommendations for online resources? A few years ago my wife and I started with Justin guitar, but then we switched to piano to tempt our daughter. Is that a good choice, or are there better options?
I (op) restarted guitar recently, and Justin Guitar definitely seemed to be the internet's recommendation. I found it to be OK! The content is good but the app was a bit janky. I switched to online Zoom classes. Two people I know have used Simply Piano (and there's a guitar version of the same app) and swear by it, so probably also worth a look.
Guitar definitely. An acoustic guitar is ideal since you just pick it up and start playing any time (even plugging something in can be a barrier sometimes). My rule is I always play for 10 minutes minimum every day, even when I'm not feeling it.
The great thing about guitars is that you can buy really well made ones, brand new, for only $100-300. That and a $10 tuner and watching free online tutorials is all you need.
I agree, musical instruments also have the benefit of a much higher skill ceiling. That can also be a downside though, since it can make it frustrating to learn
You're talking years of work to complete it. You may be thinking, "well, sure, but it's just doing the same relatively easy thing over and over for a really long time." But that's not quite it. You're making a single physical object where it's easy to make mistakes and also easy to not realize you've made a mistake. Knitting builds on the previously knitted stitches. If you miscount something early on or forget a stitch, you can end up diverging irrevocably from the pattern. A moment's inattention early on can mean you have to undo literally months of work.
A large complex project like that shawl is like a giant oil painting. It's not just the scale and time, it's the ability to consistently avoid making mistakes which requires incredible patience and discipline.
And that's just knitting the work. Now consider the mastery required to design a project like this.
My mum knits and while yes the skill ceiling is still high no I don’t think it goes as high as art and music which is literally up to like virtuoso, unattainable levels
Knitting has a lower skill ceiling doesn’t mean knitting or design is easy. I know that well, my mum ran a knitting shop and still works on patterns part time. She still knits a lot of stuff for us and it takes a lot of skill and work
But it’s not Glenn Gould on piano, is it? It’s not playing Bach fugues
> I don’t think it goes as high as art and music which is literally up to like virtuoso, unattainable levels
There is a very old, very relevant observation that when men do something we call it "art" and when women do it we call it "craft".
I don't think it makes a lot of sense to compare a performative art like playing an instrument to a constructive art like knitting because the skillsets are so different. It's like trying to decide if ice cream is better than stand up comedy.
But I do think you can reasonably compare constructive arts like painting and knitting. For those, there are two aspects: coming up with the design for what you want to make, and implementing that design. Historically, the latter was given more weight than the former. The most famous painters of the Renaissance mostly just painted pictures of normal people, but it was the execution of those paintings that made them famous. Today, thanks to the invention of reproductive technology like cameras, we mostly prize originally of thought over execution. Andy Warhol is not a particularly skilled painter. (One way to think of the modern conception of "high art" versus "low art"—think Damien Hirst versus Thomas Kinkade—is exactly the distinction between concept and execution.)
Given all that, I would the best knitting designers on the same level as the best furniture designers or portrait painters. Most knitting is deliberately not conceptual, so it's hard to compare it to explicitly conceptual art. But if you think anything can reasonably be called art when it is mostly focused on quality and difficulty of execution, then knitting is an art with a ceiling as high as any other.
How you feel about those probably reflects mostly how you feel about much of modern art. But I don't see any reason it should be considered a lower rung of art than other sculpture media just because it uses fibers and not metal or glass.
I came back to guitar after being self-taught and not very good, and was pleasantly surprised that the Trinity Guitar Initial Grade (eg the first book you'd start a kid on) had some awesome music that you could make the melodies of very quickly. Like, 2-3 hours of practice and you can slowly pick out the melody from Runaway Train, Orange Crush, and Where did you sleep last night.
I guess my point is you can get some good sounds out of the guitar very quickly, which can be very intrinsically motivating.
