That’s when I started playing my ukulele loads. I’d play it everyday, sometimes learning existing tunes and sometimes making it up.

It was the “making it up” times that I enjoyed most because they let me be more expressive. I liked creating sounds out of nowhere. They could capture the exact mood I was in.

By playing time and time again, I’d discover repeating patterns that I liked to play time and time again. I filled my mental bank with little tunes that I could strum whenever I wanted. They all came from accidental fiddling around on the strings. They all blended into each other a bit. And they were different each time I played them.

I still enjoy playing some of those early tunes. When I play a really old one, I feel a connection to my younger self. I get a glimpse of how I saw those sounds back then, and I remember how it feels to express that pattern over four strings.

And of course, I can add my modern day variation to the pattern, with my current “wisdom”, which then gets passed onwards towards future me, for further down the line.

Occasionally, I’d experience the frustration of forgetting a tune. I’d rack my brains sometimes, trying to remember, “What was that thing I played yesterday?”

It was so annoying, forgetting something. It felt like losing something important that I hadn’t finished exploring yet. So I started recording everything. Whenever I played anything new, by intention or otherwise, I recorded it on my phone.

When I needed, I listened back to a recording from yesterday or last week to jog my memory. I mostly didn’t need it, but when I did it was invaluable.

For most— I’ve listened to most recordings zero times. The second most common number is one— a one time listen—

Most of the time, listening back was a cringe inducing experience. I’d hear what I actually sounded like and shudder a little in shame. But of course, that wasn’t the point. The point was to jog my memory, and the recordings succeeded at that.

However, despite their apparent quality, old recordings did have some sort of effect on—

Occasionally I’d listen back to old old—

I’ve been recording all my little tunes for over ten years, so I now have quite a large collection. After a couple of years, I started getting occasionally curious about what sorts of sounds I was making 12 to 18 months ago. What I found were hundreds of audio snapshots of my life over many many years.

Each recording was a diary entry, telling the listener how I felt in that very moment on that very day. The sounds were largely automatic. I didn’t put any thought into them. I just let them happen, so they ended up revealing something true about my mood over the course of days and months and years.

I dig up old specific dates and I know how the sound will sound. I can hear a specific recording and tell you exactly what was happening to me or what I was doing or what was going on back then.

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