I can totally zone out creating and tweaking beats on the Drumbrute Impact. I also find it oddly comforting to have on when I'm working.
After all this, I don't know any (real) songs from start to finish. The closest I come is playing Nirvana's About a Girl.
I might have some kind of rhythm disability. If I try to play along with a record, I'm almost always lost right away because I start strumming to match the drumming pattern or the vocal rhythms.
It's so frustrating, especially when I see how fast my kids learned to play an instrument. They make it look so easy.
> If I try to play along with a record, I'm almost always lost right away because I start strumming to match the drumming pattern or the vocal rhythms.
Are you able to play any strumming patterns (however simple) with just the metronome? Ideally you'd practice this enough that you are able to do it consistently with almost zero thinking, and then check if it has improved your ability to play along with the record.
Another thing that has helped me when learning new strumming patterns (and just rhythm in general) was practicing just the strumming, muting the strings with my left hand instead of playing chords. First with the metronome, then along the record (all without any chords, just muted strings). Give that a try if you feel like it.
To answer your metronome question - I can do it for a few minutes but soon something like semantic satiation sets in and I get out of sync. I start to focus on how my arm feels strumming and I can feel the pick vibrating in my fingers and feel the air I'm moving with my arm and I notice the vibration in the guitar body and as my attention moves around, I lose track of the click.
Not surprised that these are in there!
> I can do it for a few minutes but soon something like semantic satiation sets in and I get out of sync
Huh, I never actually did that for more than a few minutes at the time (when just using the metronome), I can imagine it gets boring and attention wanders. I did try to do it frequently (couple of times a day, spread throughout the day), but only for two minutes or so.
Anyway, I thought you might have tried all of that already, considering you took lessons and bought courses, but still wanted to throw it out there. Good luck!
The great thing about guitars is that you can buy really well made ones, brand new, for only $100-300. That and a $10 tuner and watching free online tutorials is all you need.
As someone who both knits and plays a couple of instruments, I suspect you are underestimating the skill ceiling of knitting.
Take a look at something like this: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/the-queen-susan-sha...
You're talking years of work to complete it. You may be thinking, "well, sure, but it's just doing the same relatively easy thing over and over for a really long time." But that's not quite it. You're making a single physical object where it's easy to make mistakes and also easy to not realize you've made a mistake. Knitting builds on the previously knitted stitches. If you miscount something early on or forget a stitch, you can end up diverging irrevocably from the pattern. A moment's inattention early on can mean you have to undo literally months of work.
A large complex project like that shawl is like a giant oil painting. It's not just the scale and time, it's the ability to consistently avoid making mistakes which requires incredible patience and discipline.
And that's just knitting the work. Now consider the mastery required to design a project like this.
Knitting has a lower skill ceiling doesn’t mean knitting or design is easy. I know that well, my mum ran a knitting shop and still works on patterns part time. She still knits a lot of stuff for us and it takes a lot of skill and work
But it’s not Glenn Gould on piano, is it? It’s not playing Bach fugues
There is a very old, very relevant observation that when men do something we call it "art" and when women do it we call it "craft".
I don't think it makes a lot of sense to compare a performative art like playing an instrument to a constructive art like knitting because the skillsets are so different. It's like trying to decide if ice cream is better than stand up comedy.
But I do think you can reasonably compare constructive arts like painting and knitting. For those, there are two aspects: coming up with the design for what you want to make, and implementing that design. Historically, the latter was given more weight than the former. The most famous painters of the Renaissance mostly just painted pictures of normal people, but it was the execution of those paintings that made them famous. Today, thanks to the invention of reproductive technology like cameras, we mostly prize originally of thought over execution. Andy Warhol is not a particularly skilled painter. (One way to think of the modern conception of "high art" versus "low art"—think Damien Hirst versus Thomas Kinkade—is exactly the distinction between concept and execution.)
Given all that, I would the best knitting designers on the same level as the best furniture designers or portrait painters. Most knitting is deliberately not conceptual, so it's hard to compare it to explicitly conceptual art. But if you think anything can reasonably be called art when it is mostly focused on quality and difficulty of execution, then knitting is an art with a ceiling as high as any other.
And, to be clear, there are fine artists whose medium is textiles as well. For example: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-10-textile-art...
How you feel about those probably reflects mostly how you feel about much of modern art. But I don't see any reason it should be considered a lower rung of art than other sculpture media just because it uses fibers and not metal or glass.
I guess my point is you can get some good sounds out of the guitar very quickly, which can be very intrinsically motivating.