OK... I thought hard about which forum to park this in and came back here! Feel free to move it Mods! Sometimes life is too short!

As a guitar player I have always loved bottleneck (slide) guitar. I have never really practised this dark art as it always seemed too hard and I always convinced myself that I was too busy to learn (a bit like languages)... well slide guitar is a 'language' really... the same words (notes) but they just sound different!

So... to the context... I have recently become involved in two bands, both of which want me to play bottleneck on a few numbers... so I just said 'yeah' and went for it... somehow it worked for them though for me it sounded not even amateurish... just plain 'crap' (a technical term amongst guitar players = not very good!). But I persevered and was amazed at the audience reaction as well.

Now then to me a good slide player is someone like Ry Cooder, Lowell George, and all the delta blues players, but what was I hearing from li'l ole me? Hmmm... cats and squeals come to mind!

But tonight, sat hear at my computer trying to write an exam paper for some poor unforunate souls, I was listening in my head to ME playing slide - I am not kidding, it was the way I play slide and I could hear it and I GOT IT! And it sounded good!

And I started thinking... I didn't think I could do this but apparently people said yes you can and I couldn't understand why, but tonight I realised that to truly believe you can do it you need to be able to 'hear' your voice... which, whilst influenced by many others, will be unique because it is you and not the others, but that does not make it less important. If you can find that inner self, your true voice... you will be appreciated for who you are, not what you are.

And that then brings me round to MtF crossdressing (the name on the thread)...

Kaz is Work In Progress (WIP). My guitar playing is WIP. My whole life has been WIP. But when we reach a stage where we accept that we have a 'voice'... an expression of ourselves that is truly us and not some parody or cover version of what others have done before... this moves us to another level of accepting what we are capable of...

I should now go to bed as it is late here, but as I have been gigging a lot lately and getting back home in the early hours... I might just play some bottleneck guitar... dressed of course!