Coming back to an instrument after years away works, and it usually works fast. Returners progress quicker than fresh beginners because the old wiring is still in there. The hard part is the story you tell yourself about the years you didn’t play.
I know because the instrument in the closet was mine.
Why the love goes dormant #
For a stretch of years I barely played. I was busy running a business, I was on antidepressants, and music didn’t have much of a draw for me. If that sentence sounds familiar, a love for music can go dormant under work, under health, under a season of life. It doesn’t die; it waits.
There’s even a pattern to where it waits. The classical guitar I started on as a kid came out of my mom’s closet the summer of my fifth-grade year. The bass that restarted everything came out of my own closet in 2019. It was the same story, two closets apart.
I felt a sword-in-the-stone moment when I grabbed it, and I was obsessed then for years.
In 2019 I changed my lifestyle and my medications, and I picked the bass back up. What followed looked more like hunger than discipline. I sat in front of YouTube and played jazz exercises for hours a day, then started going to jams, then playing in groups. An Americana band needed an upright, so I bought a rough one, used, for 900 dollars, and learned a difficult instrument the hard way. When I moved to Denver, music opened up to me again in a way that it never had before.
I’m not promising you an obsession, and the pull you still feel toward the instrument is real, and it goes somewhere.
Does the ability come back? #
Yes, and sooner than you think. Motor memory persists for years. The chords your hands knew are dusty rather than gone. And the whole time you weren’t playing, you were still listening, which means your ear kept training without you. Returners usually surprise themselves inside the first month.
The rust is real too. Expect a few weeks of your hands catching up to your ear, and expect the old material to come back before the old fluency does. That’s how a restart normally goes.
What if your hobby history is a graveyard? #
Some people have restarted before, more than once, and carry guilt about the gear in the basement. Adults with ADHD know this cycle especially well: the new thing, the deep dive, then the case that never opens again. There’s no shame about any of that here. My lessons run interest first, we go for a feeling instead of minutes, and when a week goes blank we problem-solve what got in the way instead of holding a guilt ritual. You don’t need a diagnosis to want lessons that work this way.
What does starting again look like with me? #
It starts with a conversation about what you used to play, what stopped, and what you want now, because those are usually three different answers. I teach chord charts and ear, not sight-reading, and we start with music you actually love. Then the instrument comes out of the case and lives where you sit, because an instrument in the middle of the room gets picked up and one in a closet doesn’t.
Maybe you already know where you want this to go: playing for your family, recording a track of yourself, or a Denver jam night someday, and when you’re ready for one, I’ll be there. And playing at home, for yourself, is a complete destination.