What else are you creative with?

When I logged on earlier, I noticed the tab was named "creative writing" which got me thinking, what else are you creative with?

As an example, I love to cook Italian food (my own version, of course) and I like baking (my gingerbread reindeer were absolutely fab!). I can cross stitch and I have made tiaras and greeting cards in the past. I can run up some damn fine bedding and curtains using a sewing machine and I spent a couple of months with a bunch of Year one kids (age 5/6) making wooden bird houses and paper mache hot air balloons. I can draw, but not brilliantly and I cannot knit or crochet to save my life.

So, what else are you creative with ...?

 

I can just about draw, and I also enjoy a spot of photography when the mood arises. I play the trombone as well, if that counts - I've passed my Grade 5 and received a merit, but that was probably three or four years ago. I just play for fun at the moment, but I am looking for an orchestra or band which does not practice on Sundays.

I'm also working on some magic right now (real magic tricks, not 5-year old ones), which is exciting. Learning the tricks of the trade.

Fancy chucking one of your gingerbread reindeer over to me? I love food, and anyone who makes it. I can cook a good meal, but certainly not a wide range; I'm not one of those 'cheese on toast' people, although I do like cheese on toast.

Oh, and I forgot! I also paint Warhammer 40k miniatures from scratch, and I'm starting to make scenarios with them. It's actually more relaxing than you think (if you like the hobby), and time actually flies - you can feel like you've been painting for 15-30 minutes when really 3 hours have passed.

I kid you not.

 

The piano. The one thing I've learned over the years is that girls love a piano player. So if my love poems don't charm her, I can always play a romantic tune.

 

Music for me--guitar, drums (sometimes), songwriting, etc.

And making mix CDs. I'm awesome at putting other people's songs in the right order.

 

I can play the first eight bars of Moonlight Sonata on the piano. I used to play the saxophone but last time I picked it up I couldn't remember which note was which. I was good at drawing at art college but that was a long time ago. I'm not bad at photography. I design airplane engines for fun and I can make a pretty good fire out of wood.

 

I remember someone telling me that if one writes, then they are not a good artist, and if one draws, then they are not a good writer. It doesn't seem plausible, but I am one with a high IQ level. Still don't know. Anyway, I love drawing and making my own storylines out of my art. Comic crafting is fun. I love the thrill of making something with a lot of beauty in it, and have one like my order of events. I am also a person who likes to sculpt, snap pictures, and sing.

 

I tried to learn the 3rd movement but gave up after about five minutes.

 

I knit and dabble in designing my own patterns. I love to bake bread. I'm just more of a 'creative in any way' person. Unfortunately that interferes with writing time.

 

I sing, play guitar (mostly 12-string, but I've rediscovered my Stratocaster recently and it's making me very, very happy), and I write songs. I screw around with other musical instruments (keyboards, harmonicas, recorders, flutes, various percussion instruments), but I'm mainly a singer-guitarist.

I love making recordings of myself, but I have an almost crippling case of stage fright. It's very difficult for me to sing and play in front of a crowd, especially if they're strangers. I can sing for my family, but that's about it.

 

I play classical guitar, electric guitar, drums, write my own songs and arrange them for my band, and I draw (or doodle since I'm not good enough to call it drawing, but to get better, I try to draw one piece a day, be it a full, colored drawing or just a pencil sketch).

@minstrel, I used to be like that, but nowadays I'm pretty much the opposite, loving the stage. I was wondering; have you ever read about / studied different ways to control the effects of adrenaline (which is essentially what strage fright is, afaik)? That's how I got over my stage fright (although I still do get nervous during the first song or two). If you haven't, I can PM the names of a couple of very useful books.
Not to turn the thread into guitar porn, but which Strat do you have? I'd buy one if I had the money, even if just for the whammy bar, but right now I gotta get by with my trusty war horse Tele.

Anyway, I love recording in the studio (not such a huge fan of mixing / mastering, though, but cutting tracks is fun, be it guitar or drums), but the main reason I play in a band are the gigs. Nothing feels quite like the rush you get onstage when the whole band is really getting into it, giving it their sweaty all, the audience is getting into it, everybody is feeding off of everybody, there's a mosh pit going on, and you just let loose. And then you jump into the moshpit!
Many a time I've gotten whacked in the head by our bass player's headstock and more than once I've done the same to someone else while jumping and bumping around in the pit and playing (or trying to) the guitar at the same time.


I'm not sure if they're creative hobbies in the strictest sense of the word, but they are about improvisation, so martial arts and faux parkour are also things I enjoy.

Sparring in boxing and Brazilian jiu-jitsu is like a painful jam session with the band: you react to what the other person is doing while trying to trick him into leaving openings you have to exploit quickly enough before he can react and get out of the way / block / parry / counter.

The fake parkour is something we sometimes do with @KaTrian, i.e. we go for a jog in a suitable area (with lots of fences, empty buildings, no people etc.) and try to figure out ways to clear the obstacles in the most efficient way possible, preferably without stopping the jog to think about it. We're just not any good at it yet (pretty much the only "specialty" things we know how to do are basic wall runs and jumping forward rolls / ukemis).

 

I enjoy drawing, I'm not very good at it, and haven't really tried to get better at it, but I like it. I rarely complete anything though, it's just a spur of the moment thing.
One thing I love is painting war-game miniatures, hobby that eventually led me to diorama modeling.

I used to play guitar and drums when I was a teen, but I don't play anymore. Bought a Feadóg a while back, maybe one day I'll start learning seriously.

 

It's a little bizarre that of the 11 people who have replied to this thread, you are the 4th who plays / has played both guitar and drums.

 

My Strat is a stock, black-bodied, maple-necked unit. White pickguard. It looks like the guitar Eric Clapton poses with on the cover of his "Just One Night" live album - I'm a big Clapton fan, and that's probably why I wanted this specific model. It's serial number E994715, not that that means anything. My father bought it for me for my birthday back in the 80s. It has a vibrato tailpiece, but I don't use it. I've taken the whammy bar off and it sits in the case to this day - I have pretty good finger vibrato and bend vibrato, even on double stops and some full chords. The whammy bar just gets in the way.

I have a Squire Telecaster that's currently at my sister's house in Toronto, thousands of miles away from me, alas. My brother-in-law has done some impressive work on it (replacing the pickguard, installing individual bridge saddles for each string, etc.) so I think it's basically his now. He and I met in university and played together in an amateur band then, so if it has to go to anybody, I'm glad it's him. Besides, maybe my twelve-year-old nephew might pick it up and join the Brotherhood of Guitarists at some point. I'd love that.

I only have the Tele because I used to play the flute, and thought that saxophone fingering was the same as the flute's, so why not get a sax? I bought a tenor sax, but I could never master the embouchure. I could play it very well for about five minutes, but then it would get terribly painful - I wasn't using my mouth the right way. So I gave up, went back to the music store, and traded it straight up for my Tele.

 

Most people I know play or have played the guitar at some point in their life, I think it's the most played instrument you can find.

When we tried forming bands among friends there was always shortage of bass guitar players and drummers. That's how I eventually started drumming.

 

I'm sure guitar is the most popular instrument there is. I bet if I knocked on every door in my nieghborhood, I'd find a guitar in about forty percent of them. Everybody plays guitar. Which means everybody plays bass, too - though that takes a different mindset.

Drums are tough, though. I had a friend when I was a kid who wanted to be a drummer, but a drum kit is a big, clumsy thing that's hard to move around (you pretty much have to have a van just for the drums), so he gave up and became another guitarist. Argh. We need drummers, but the kit is too unwieldy!

 

Yeah, the unwieldy kit is a factor. Especially drums. They're 'not only a pain to howk around—and I used to 'help' a drummer drag his kit up and down stairs, so I know what I'm talking about here—but they also requires a lot of space inside a house as well. Not to mention soundproofing? Another advantage of guitar, or at least acoustic guitar. It's relatively quiet.

When I was a child, I was determined to play the cello—until I had to drag my instrument (borrowed, fortunately) from school to home every day. I quickly switched to violin! Which I also gave up soon afterwards, because I hated having to hold my arm up in the air all the time. (I regret this move, actually.) And then I took up guitar ...and played for many years. Now I mostly play 'the CD.'

 

Oh, I don't need it for the vibrato either; I kinda had to develop a strong vibrato early on for the classical stuff, but there are some riffs I have in mind that I just can't play without a whammy bar, so those songs have to wait until I get a guitar with one, but I'm actually considering just getting a pedal that could do the same thing since then I wouldn't have all the tuning issues (and nowadays they have a few pretty good albeit expensive pedals that do what I'm looking for, like The Bomber by Morpheus), and I got room for one more pedal on my pedal board.

Usually I try to keep everything as stock as possible (so if... when something breaks, I can just waltz into the nearest music shop and buy a replacement), but I did change the nut (from plastic to graphite; did the same for @KaTrian's SG and now it stays in tune much better) and the Tele's pickups 'cause we play lots of clubs at loud volumes and some of them have really bad acoustics for rock bands = lots of squealy feedback, so I got stacked DiMarzio humbuckers which helped a lot.

I'm still considering going back to single coils 'cause I'm seriously GASsing after Bareknuckle Pickups's Flat 50s and I do prefer the tone of single coils, but that's gonna happen when I have extra cash to spare, i.e. probably never, which sucks 'cause our bass player is a rich computer nerd and constantly buys new boutique effects, amps, custom-built 8-string basses etc. while I can barely afford the air I breathe. The good thing about writing is that it's not an arms race.

As long as you don't plug into an amp, the electric is even quieter; you can barely hear it and can play it even at night in an apartment building (or while the Mrs. is sleeping in the next room) whereas the acoustic is a tad too loud for nightly exploits. The only downside is that unless it's totally quiet, you don't hear pinch harmonics all that well unplugged.

And yeah, I still remember when I played mostly drums and had my own kit. It was a serious PITA to lug around, but I still love the hell out of playing drums. The guitar is my main instrument, but I don't get the same soaring feeling I do from playing drums.

 

Embarrassingly enough, I too have played the guitar... in an all-girl band in high school. I was such a cliché. I picked it up again after I got an Epiphone SG as a wedding present from @T.Trian , but now there's been a regrattably long break 'cause writing and sports hog up most of my free time. I do draw every now and then, but I'm quite hopeless at it -- apart from drawing horses.

Some girls I'm glad that when I met my future hubby, he didn't start playing any romantic tunes with his guitar I've never much like the piano, for some reason. I feel like it largely lacks the physicality that is often present when playing other common instruments, even the drums. Sure, I've seen some cool videos where the pianist has moved as much as they can, but for me it still lacks the it, whatever that it is. On the other hand, I'm a fairly visual person. I feel like music is pretty much at its best when experienced live.

 

I would've paid to see your band!

That would've been so weird. But I did play for you the first time we met when you missed your train home and had to wait a few hours for the next one. We'd stayed up all night, and you were nodding off, curled up on the beanbag chair while I noodled out a few songs to lull you into sleep. After assuring your mom I'd send you home on the next train.
Now that I think about it, one of the songs might've been Blackmore's Night's Shadow of the Moon. Does that count as a romantic song?

 

I worked as a computer game designer for twelve years.

I dabble a little in board game and card game creation. I have a card game that might be workable into something publishable, but like many creative sectors it's a tough business.

Right now I'm making a trail of clues for an Easter egg hunt for our daughters.

 

Great thread! I know it pops up every now and again. I wish I had some background in music like many of the others here. My sister was great on the violin before we changed schools and lost the program. 1st chair county honor orchestra, if I remember correctly. My did is also a musician--a beast on the keyboard, piano, and the organ actually--and his whole family is musically inclined some degree. I'm the outlier, it seems.

Ummm. I like to cook when I have the means. I enjoy trying French dishes (I think I may have been french in a past life or something) because they take so much patience and dedication to make. After a couple of tries with a new recipe, I try making my own modifications. I don't exactly have training to know how certain spices affect my dish, but I try things out by taste ha ha. I also like baking from time to time. It's an art form all it's own, in a way.

When it's not cooking (because, you know, just can't always do that) I'll usually draw a picture. I'm not all that good, I could stand to learn quite a bit more, but for someone with no training I think I'm okay. Sometimes I just see things (with my inner eye ) and then I can draw it... well I have to see the process win my head.

I used to do a little carpentry/woodworking, but I haven't done anything in a while. Don't really have the wood, work-space or tools for it anyway. I miss it though, from time to time. I think the last thing I made was my walking stick, which originated as a branch from a tree I removed in the front yard. I whittled it down a bit, filed off some of the notches, sanded it a few times and thing polished it. Only after that did I think to put a design on it. So I re-sanded the top and burned an interesting birdlike pattern onto it and some Japanese characters.

And when I can get my hands on some pipe-cleaner, I like to make little figures/models. Usually I make people and animals, but I am thinking of building a miniature house next--if I get more. They cost more than I have right now

 

I can't remember you serenading me, which is good, because I just find the whole serenading business awkward. Don't ask me why.

 

I can't remember what I played, but I did play something (not serenading, though, more like providing background music; didn't really need any extra romance in the air or it would've turned into syrup which is kinda hard to breathe), but seeing as we were both tired and still more than a wee bit tipsy, my memories are a bit hazy as well.

 

@T.Trian, I kind of have a knee-jerk reaction against whammy bars. Unless they're used by either David Gilmour or Jeff Beck, they sound like, "Hey, everybody! I've got a whammy bar! Listen! Bwaow bwaow! Hear that? Isn't it amazing? I'm the greatest guitarist in the world because I can go bwaow bwaow!"

I hate that.

But I love the Strat. Beautiful neck - fits my hand really well. I have small hands, so a small neck works best for me. (How the heck to I call myself a 12-string player when I have small hands? Beats me, but my 12-string is my baby.)