Keener Music

I learned how to play guitar when I was about 14. Perhaps one day I’ll talk more about my whole learning experience, but for now, I just want to point out how fortunate I was to have a guitar to console me during the times of depression that most teenagers go through.

And there were many times over the years when I would find myself down, and used my guitar as a way of helping me get out of the rut. The most significant time where the guitar helped me to go on was after my wife died in September 2001. Psychiatrists say that one becomes actually clinically depressed after losing a spouse and that the period of clinical depression can last years, with three years being perhaps “typical.” That was the case for me … I could function and continue to work, but for three years, I was really depressed, even when I laughed with friends and family.

My guitars saved me from insanity during that period.

Strangely, though, when Buster B Jones passed away, I lost all interest in picking. For once I did not turn to my guitars to help me get through the loss of a friend. I guess it was all a matter of timing. My wife passed away in 2001, then my Dad passed away in 2003, then Jerry Reed in 2008 and then Buster a few months later (in 2009) … it just seemed like all my guitar heroes were gone (along with my biggest fan, my wife), and “what the hell point was there left in picking?”

That lasted for about 8 months with me, and, finally, on the last day of December in 2009, I said “enough is enough.” I decided it was time for me to get off my ass and play. And I decided that I didn’t want to die with my music in me, and that I needed to share it, whether it was good, bad or in between. So, I made my first-ever YouTube video:

There’s lots wrong with the video: the volume is too low and I make a Huge mistake in it. I could have kept trying to make it error-free, but when you’ve gone without picking for 8 months, a couple of hours of practicing ain’t gonna make you able to play error-free.

Anyway, since that time I’ve put close to a hundred videos on YouTube. None of them are perfect, but, like with the one above, all of them have something a little different than the standard way the tunes would be played.

There have still been lots of times since that video was made that I have gone for weeks or months without playing. Part of that is that my interests are changing now that I’ve been retired for about five years. But, I do intend to keep sharing what little I know as long as I able to.

To see all my videos to date, you can check out my YouTube channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/drkeener?feature=mhee

I’ll be singling out some of the videos to talk about on this blog, perhaps to describe in a little more detail how I am playing them. Until then, so long.