There was a time when I was 17, before I applied to university, when I walked up to my parents and told them that I wanted to go to music school. Being conservative Chinese parents, the thought of their first-born son going into music school must have been shocking to say the least.

The part of me who wanted to become a musician imagined me becoming the next John Williams, playing at Lincoln Centre or Wigmore Hall to packed audiences. I have never actually met any professional musicians (my guitar teacher then was an amateur), so I had little idea of the trials and tribulations involved. Naivity perhaps, either way the path I took was totally different. I have kept on playing the guitar all these while, although there were times when frustration set in at my own lack of talent, inspiration dried up or there was simply not enough time for me to devote to my music.

This morning, despite being a Saturday, I dragged myself up from bed at 9am. I was supposed to go to Annapolis, a town about 40 miles outside Baltimore most famous for being the site of the US Naval Academy, to meet Todd K. Todd is one of the regulars at one of the internet classical guitar forums I regularly visit, and since I would be in the general area, I decided to take the chance to visit him. The easiest, and most expensive, way to get there would have been to take a taxi to the Greyhound station and take a coach from there, but this would have cost me about $25 one way. Being in parsimonious mood, I took the cheapest option, which involves taking the Light Rail and then changing to a bus. I left my apartment at 10am, and I alighted from the bus at downtown Baltimore at about 12.30.

After calling him from a public phone, he walked over to bring me to his house, which turned out to be only about 5 minutes' walk from the town centre. His house is in a rather untidy area, but as a plaque next to his front door informed me, it is a pretty old and historical house. The house was pretty quaint, if slightly untidy, and he led me to his basement which basically functions as his recording studio. There was a couple of large speakers there, a rack of equipment, a computer ('Oh, it's just a P4 3GHz with 3 Gigs of RAM...') and a pair of condenser mikes as well as other miscellaneous musical paraphernalia.

Todd's father was a guitarist, and he's been playing the guitar all his life, although he's only gone seriously into classical and flamenco guitar in the past few years. He makes a living by doing gigs at restaurants and teaching, and he pretty spends most of his time playing music. He's an extremely good player, although he plays with a rather unorthodox technique...in his right hand, he holds a pick between his thumb and index finger to play the bass strings, and his middle, ring and little fingers to play the rest (anyone who's seen a classical guitarist will know that they generally never use a pick or the little finger).

Apart from emerging for lunch in town, we pretty much spent most of our time in his basement/studio listening to each other play, chatting and listening to music. It was great fun to just get absorbed in music and hang out with Todd, especially since we had different approaches to music. He's in his 30s, and he spent most of his youth playing rock and jazz guitar, before getting into flamenco and classical guitar, whereas I am of the more orthodox approach, and listen to/play only classical music.

Most eye-openingly, I had a glimse of into the life of a musician, not that of the musician who's made it to the very top, but that of one who is content with just having the chance to do something he loves in life. It's a carefree life, since he's unmarried and has no one to support, nor is he materialistic. He doesn't earn very much, and of what he earns he mostly plows into recording and and musical equipment. It's not a high-flying lifestyle, but he gets to do what he loves with his life.

Personally, I feel some horror at the thought of such an unsecure, Bohemian lifestyle. I'm not a risk-taker, and I tend to go for the safe and familiar rather than the new and risky. Still, I admire the courage it must take to take the plunge and risk everything to pursue a passion in life.

It has been a great day out, and it has reinvigorated my love for music. Incidentally, he managed to talk me into recording a couple of pieces on his recording setup, and I'll post it once he emails it to me.