Creating music

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I've been playing guitar for the past 20 years or so, starting my freshman year at the University of Iowa. When I first started, I took guitar lessons for about a year off-and-on from a guitarist named Tom Nothnagle. We mostly focussed on basic chords, a tiny bit of music theory, and lots of interesting discussions. I remember sitting in my dorm room trying to write songs, recording them on a cassette player stereo. It was such a great creative outlet. 

Over the years, my guitar playing has improved at a glacial pace, with bursts of activity after making a new guitar purchase. As I mentioned in a previous post, a couple of weeks ago I purchased a new Taylor acoustic six string guitar and am entering into a renewed period of inspired music making. To help spur on my creativity I also purchased a couple of really well-written books on songwriting for guitar:

The first one discusses basic music theory for people like myself who know their way around on a guitar but don't know, for example, what key they are playing in. 

I'm also interested in exploring the landscape of online music sharing and collaborating resources. I've come across several that look promising:

Garageband is mainly a music sharing and networking site, where members review each others' music. When I joined last week I was required to review a couple of songs from other members. I haven't explored the other sites yet. This blog post I found reviews some of these types of sites and their copyright policies.

I created a new section called Music under Projects on my site. I'm still experimenting with a good format. At the moment I've got an embedded music player streaming songs I've uploaded over at Garageband, and I've only got one song up (well, a skeleton of a song) that I composed in Garageband about four years ago. No melody/lyrics yet, but it's got potential. Hopefully I'll be posting new musical sketches periodically in the near future.