For 10 years of my life I was very involved in athletics/sports.
I played soccer for 6 years and football for 4 years. But I got injured a lot, and so at the age of 16 I took up the guitar.
Music in itself is physical, just a different kind of physical from sports.
My parents rented me a nylon string guitar for about 6 months the summer we moved back from TX to MO.
I played on that thing diligently and relentlessly learning everything I could (mostly self taught on that instrument but had a few lessons)
Once my parents discovered I was serious enough about it they bought me a red fender stratocaster electric guitar.
I was so excited. I used to lock myself in my room for hours listening to guitar music and learning to play all kinds of rock music.
I never really learned whole songs in the beginning. It was always chords, riffs, solos. Then eventually mastering songs from beginning to end.
My mother always wanted me to play piano and thought I’d be good at it, and we had an upright in the living room that my sister was learning to play.
I was always uninterested and dismissive.
I continued my journey in music when I got to college (I have a degree in music therapy and practiced as an MT-BC for nearly a decade) and had all my music juries for jazz guitar.
It wasn’t until, my sophomore year of college that I discovered that my major required me to not only be proficient in guitar but also in piano.
So I began my long journey with the piano at age 20.
I began playing classical music and then moved into the contemporary piano genres and found my home there.
I’ve touched a guitar maybe twice in the past 12 years, and haven’t played guitar seriously since the late 80s/early 90s.
I’ve focused on the piano and haven’t looked back, and have made a career out of playing the piano.
Mom was right 🙂