Fellas, I am sound card challenged, so I'm afraid I can't do the chords.

Jeepman, I admire your persistence. Don't ever give up just because it's hard to make some of this work. It WILL all click eventually...it sounds like you are already immersed in the good music it takes to build up a "Tone Memory."

Example-- I CAN actually read music, although very slowly, and I just don't like to. And I don't have to!Let me learn a tune by hearing it, anytime. They get embedded... right now, although I have not heard "Miss the Mississippi" for years and never really learned it, it's been running through my head all AM, exactly as Doc W did it, but with little embellishments I can hear as if his band is actually playing them. By tomorrow there will be some new tune forming in my mind that is an offshoot of this one. Yesterday I could only get hold of one line of the melody, and now here goes my head creating an arrangement as though I have the score open in front of me.

See, the music in my genes-- my people helped start and have played in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and my great grandfather was a fine classical composer and dean of the prestigious Northwestern University School of Music. We don't "DO" music... music IS US. But the way music happens in me is much more organic than anything that is best captured, or expressed, or communicated with notation and rules.

So I didn't learn music theory. And when I became the music leader for our church's new praise and worship service, I had to learn a whole new genre of music, and did, in a few months, by tape. The "rules" of that genre crept into my mind where they now live alongside all the others I have absorbed.

So this is the long way of saying-- You go, dude! Ask for any help you need, to make music the way it works for you. Just keep doing it.

~Susan