Aspies For Freedom

I play the flute in a marching band.  That is so not typically aspies.  Most of the band are teacher and kept telling me that I have a non-verbal learning disorder.  That is how I came to start looking up Asperger's syndrome on the internet.  

It is one thing to play the flute, another to play with other people and another thing to march while doing it.  It takes me a great deal of concentration and I have been really frustrated.  However, I have made some improvements.  It is one of the few social activities that I enjoy.  

I usually end up doing photocopying jobs for them too.  Everyone else hates that but I see how it is necessary.  I love sorting music.  I also have a computer notation program that I can use to make clear and neat copies of handwritten arrangements.  I also bake snacks for long rides.  I might not be the most talented musician but I do contribute much.

I played the flute for about 10 years and slowly progressed up to Grade 7 (I don't know if that makes sense to anyone outside the UK but the grading system goes from 1 to 8). I used to quite enjoy it and was a member of a school orchestra and two different bands during the time I played it. As I progressed though, I found it incredibly difficult to read the music and process what I was reading, as pieces became more and more complex and ended up quitting for that reason. It was sadly getting to the stage where I was having to mime most of the music I was playing and the enjoyment faded, as I was getting more and more frustrated.

I'm actually thinking of taking up the flute myself next. I always wanted the flute and the bass guitar to be my two major instruments so that whenever I'm doing my bass guitar practice at home, if my fingertips get a bit worn out from plucking and sliding up and down the bass guitar strings I can immediately switch to doing some flute practice for a few minutes intermittently until my fingers start to settle down enough for me to resume my bass guitar practice again for another hour, then back to the flute again for another half-hour, then back to the bass guitar again.

Plus, I can then experiment by dub-recording my own original repetitive disco/funk and jazz/blues relaxation music when doing my regular music practice at home and lay both the flute and bass guitar tracks down (with the occasional portable drum-machine in the background sometimes) in a single home dub-recording session. To me, for some reason, the sound of the flute and the electric bass guitar seem to blend beautifully together.

Also, it would be so super if I could team up with a young female flautist to form our own boy/girl flute-and-bass-guitar duo, so that we can even share each other's instrumental skills and she could then teach me how to play to flute while I teach her how to play the bass guitar and then we can even swap our instrumental roles too for certain tunes. That would be lots of great GROOVY fun!