My Greatest Regret

[Bob Clark]

No regrets. They're pointless. We make the best decisions we can at the time given our knowledge and experience. Today is what matters. Make today the best day you can.

[Billy Packard]

I’m just glad to be me and alive!

[DaveGinNJ]

Two actually....not sticking with the music lessons my mom insisted on and not picking up a mandolin when I was a teen.

It's easy look back and try to impart your current mindset on the teen version of you, but for most of us our priorities back then were far different. If the current you could travel back in time and try to convince the teen you to do those things, it likely would have fallen on deaf ears. I have a long list of things I did, or didn't do, as a teen that I regret.

[Alan Spector]

My greatest regret was picking up a banjo in 1963 ... and sticking with it. Okay, that's not MY biggest regret but it is my wife's.

My biggest regret, like so many other folks' is not buying a truckload of Gibson mandolins and banjos and Martin guitars in the 1960s and a couple of Nuggets, Monteleones and Stivers in the 1970s. Then again, I might as well be whining about not buying Amazon or Netflix stock 15 years ago or Apple stock in the 1980s! I do LOVE my 1917 A Gibson mando....great, great round hole sound for the price.

[dhergert]

Interesting, I hadn't heard of this particular tuning before. What are its benefits / disadvantages? I have commonly tuned down my mandos in the past (CGDA usually) to reduce tension and get a lower tone out of them with mixed results, but they can be played the same as GDAE and use the same tabs.

Thanks for your interest. Rather than derail this thread, to start with you might want to look at the "How I tune my mandolins" link in my signature.

Also there's a good recent Cafe' thread discussing "Alternative Tunings" that you may want to look at. If you have further questions for me about this we can address them in that thread.

[Hendrik Ahrend]

Acta est fabula!

[Al Trujillo]

It's easy look back and try to impart your current mindset on the teen version of you, but for most of us our priorities back then were far different. If the current you could travel back in time and try to convince the teen you to do those things, it likely would have fallen on deaf ears. I have a long list of things I did, or didn't do, as a teen that I regret.

If I was a teen again and know what I do now....I'd sure apologize to a LOT of people!

[JeffD]

If I were to aspire to be in the same universe as Chris Thile, I would have had to start playing ten years before I was born. But instead I wasted those ten years waiting around.

[meditation]

I can relate to this. I started out with Piano lessons when I was young, and I enjoyed it at first. But then my piano teacher decided to retire, and I got a new teacher who I didn't like at all, so I quit taking lessons.

[Marcus CA]

For me, there are two categories: greatest regrets, and greatest musical regrets.

Greatest musical regret: always playing and never practicing.

[Eldon Dennis]

Not placing my intended order of a Gilchrist F5 when they were only $8,000. I convinced myself that it was just too much $$$ for a mandolin at the time.

[NDO]

Greatest regret… not buying a lifetime hunting/fishing license before moving from Montana.
Greatest musical regret… waiting until I was 56 before picking up a stringed instrument…because it looked too hard! (Luckily picked up harmonicas a few decades earlier but even that left a gap of a decade or so after grade school clarinet/sax that was a musical loss).

[lflngpicker]

I regret not continuing with the violin in 1966 in what would have been my third year in the school orchestra. I had been a guitar player first in 1962 and quit the violin in 6th grade because I was in a garage rock band. (We played Monkees, Stones, Ventures, and Animals covers). I wanted the cool image, rather than continue to be seen on the orchestral stage.