Instruments you DON'T play: Why?

Subject: RE: Instruments you DON'T play: Why?
From: GUEST,LDT
Date: 17 Nov 10 - 04:33 AM

Guitar....I'd love to as it seems so popular, but I just can't 'get it' I struggled to learn that deep purple riff...and can't stand how it hurts my fingers. (In fact my guitar failure put me off all stringed instruments, till recently when I gave fiddle a go).
Wind instruments especially small, chap, portable ones as they would be useful and practical, but I just don't seem to have the lungpower. Every time I've tried something like penny whistle or harmonica I've just made myself wheezy, dizzy, and headachy.

Subject: RE: Instruments you DON'T play: Why?
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 17 Nov 10 - 04:31 AM

Harmonica - I've tried and failed on various occasions.

Subject: RE: Instruments you DON'T play: Why?
From: Darowyn
Date: 17 Nov 10 - 04:26 AM

I'm generally useless with wind instruments. It's something to do with the timing. I suspect that from years of playing strings, my fingers have learned when to move, and I expect to hear the note at that instant. I can just about use recorders etc. in the studio, though I don't think I'd try it live.
I'd love to play violin too, but I find that it requires such an extreme rotation of my left wrist that it seems to jam up the tendons in my fingers. So if I do play, I have to play with the violin upright, on my knee, like a little cello.
Apart from that, my biggest blind spot is a drumkit. Hand drums, I'm fine with, but two hands, two feet, and a pair of sticks, all playing different patterns- my brain doesn't work that way!
Cheers
Dave

Subject: RE: Instruments you DON'T play: Why?
From: Will Fly
Date: 17 Nov 10 - 04:04 AM

Though a guitarist, I've never had a hankering to play a resonator guitar or a Dobro. Nothing against the instruments, and I like to hear them played well - they just don't appeal to me as a player. Not that bothered about open guitar tunings, either, which is probably part of the reason.

As far as the fiddle is concerned, I did take it up nearly two years ago, in spite of being surrounded by excellent players! I wouldn't play it at session just yet, though the day will undoubtedly come...

Not keen on 5-string banjo either, though I did play tenor banjo for many years until the tenor guitar came along. It's rare to hear a 5-string banjo played in some of the older, more 'classsic' styles (think Olly Oakley, for example), these days. It's rather dispiriting to go to a singaround or session and see a 5-string banjo player use a capo for every change of key.

Subject: RE: Instruments you DON'T play: Why?
From: SteveMansfield
Date: 17 Nov 10 - 04:01 AM

Melodeon.

I love the sound of them in the hands of skilled players like Andy Cutting and Saul Rose and Tim Van Eyken and so forth, I'd love to be able to do that, and it would be really handy to be able to play melodeon for the morris ...

But I just can't make it happen. My brain just does not work that way. I've spent weeks with borrowed boxes on several occasions over the last 30 years, both on my own and with other people trying to teach me, and at the end of that time I still can't find the first note of the simplest of tunes, let alone progress from that to the second note of the tune.

I can play wind and string instruments to a pretty reasonable standard so I'm used to having the two hands doing different things, I can play English concertina .. but anything where the note is different on the push than it is on the pull just makes my head explode, my hands freeze, and the tune disappear in a welter of false starts. Ah well.

Subject: RE: Instruments you DON'T play: Why?
From: GUEST,Clumper
Date: 17 Nov 10 - 12:22 AM

Cathedral Organ.

Oh I don't, guess I just aint got round to it yet ?

Subject: Instruments you DON'T play: Why?
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 16 Nov 10 - 11:36 PM

The subject here is not instruments you don't play because you dislike them, but ones that you really like (or are at least intrigued by) but which you don't play for some reason.

For me, the main instrument I don't play is the fiddle. I love it, and I'm sure I could become reasonably good at it. I already know lots of fiddle tunes on other instruments and learning new instruments seems to come fairly easy for me.

The primary problem is that I regularly play music with three very good fiddlers and I'm not brave enough to be a beginner in their presence. It'd probably take me years to get good enough to feel like I was contributing anything to a session in which any of them were playing, and I can already make a contribution by playing the instruments I already know.

A secondary reason I've never taken up the fiddle is that my wife divorced her first husband while he was a beginning fiddler. She says it was only a minor factor in the divorce, but why take chances? She already endured my learning to play banjo and Dobro and that's probably as much as I'm willing to ask of one wife.

Another instrument I don't play but would like to is the harp guitar. The reason for not playing it is purely financial. Those damned things are expensive!   Unlike most instruments, there are no decent introductory priced models. There are some cheap Chinese-made things which are, by most reports, universally despicable. Bottom dollar for something that's worth playing is around $4,000 USD (and I'm having trouble comming up with half that for a new hammered dulcimer). Maybe if I win the lottery.... Maybe if I'd buy a ticket.