---
title: "Definitely one of the musical instruments ever"
permalink: /:title/
description: "Comprehensive list of musical instruments I can play in varying levels of expertise, sorted according to the time I learned them from earliest to latest... now read that again, but faster"
category: personal
---

Learning to play musical instruments taught me a lot about learning things in general. There's a creative and logical side to it. There's a mental and physical side to it. There's an existential and spiritual side to it. There's practical and theoretical applications. I even have some parenting lessons I got from playing drums and bass (more on those later).

There's just too many sides to mention, actually, but in this post, I just wanna take some time to look back to all the musical instruments I ever played and write down some brief commentary on each... more or less.

## 1. ukulele (a.k.a., yukelele)

Back when I was at a young age--maybe around 4 to 5 years old--my father bought instruments for me and my elder sister. She got a nice ukulele, and I got a small guitar made of coconut shells. I don't know what was the expectation there... but I ended up breaking mine and taking hers.

It's not like I was a jerk to my sister or something; you see my sister and I had one of those double decker beds and I accidentally dropped the fragile coconut guitar from the top bed. I was heartbroken, and because she didn't really took interest in playing her instrument, I sort of took it over... for caretaking.

There you go, I was a good kid.

We earned money, divided in equal parts, from my ukulele-playing because we used it a lot during Christmas carolling season. Fun!

Looking back now and considering a friend's definition of "professional", which was "if you are earning money doing something, you are a pro", then it is safe to say I was a pro ukulele-player at around 4 to 5 years old.

## 2. recorder (that wind pipe thingy)

The recorder was kind of weird because it didn't actually record anything. Maybe they ran out of names for wind instruments?

Anyway, we had one of those too growing up. Color white, hard plastic (I think), and I played it a lot when I got board of the ukulele.

The thing about wind instruments is you have to manage a lot of spit. I was exceptionally known to have more saliva on my face and clothes as a kid even during normal, non-recorder-playing days; it was gross. You can just imagine what that was like I guess...

So I never played the recorder in front of an audience except that one time when I met a couple of other kids who really liked it so I showed off. We hit it off, and after that, I remember them calling the house landline a few times and we got jammin' over the phone... spit and all.

## 3. classical & acoustic guitar

I'm categorizing here because I only picked up the electric guitar much much later




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4. keyboard / piano (very basic)
5. electric bass
6. drums (the kind you see in rock bands)
7. bajo de arco (the big standing bass you see in string ensembles)
8.  -->