Man relearns to play guitar with one arm following stroke: “When people said I wouldn’t be able to play again, I wasn’t going to listen to that”
A musician from Scotland has re-learned to play guitar using one arm following a stroke that originally left him unable to speak or walk.
49-year-old Tony Romaine from Inverness was already thinking about music as soon as he began rehabilitation and started learning to walk again. With his left hand and arm out of action, he went on to practice guitar using just one arm.
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Romaine, who’s described as “a music lover from childhood”, regularly played gigs around his home city. He began re-learning to play starting with The Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby using a stripped-back arrangement, before composing original material once again.
Speaking to the BBC, Romaine states, “I couldn’t imagine not doing music in my life. When people said I probably wouldn’t be able to play again, I wasn’t going to listen to that. There was probably a part of me that was like ‘I’ll prove you wrong’ but I just had to get back to playing again.”
He later adds, “The first thing the physiotherapist said to me was that she just wanted me to sit up. I said to them ‘I don’t know how to do that’, so she helped me, and eventually I managed to sit at the edge of the bed. That was the start. But to be honest, I was thinking about music from the first day I was in hospital. There was so much stuff going through my head at that point but I was thinking that I’d have to cancel gigs and I was trying to figure out how I was going to do it.”
“Two years ago I wrote this song. Three days later, I suffered a devastating stroke,” Romaine recalls. “I couldn’t move, speak or even swallow to allow me to eat or drink, I couldn’t even breathe properly. I spent over seven months in the hospital rehabilitating. When I finally left the hospital I was still in a wheelchair and couldn’t use my left arm (I still can’t) but I was determined to make music again.”
Romaine released the single Standing Stone back in August. In the same month, he also played his first gig in over two years: “I was absolutely exhausted,” he says. “I stood out of my wheelchair at the end and my legs were shaking. But I’m growing in stamina all the time – I’m hoping to do an hour and a half, maybe split in two 45 minute sets, for my next gigs.”
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You can keep up to date with Tony Romaine via his Facebook page. Standing Stone is available to stream now.
The post Man relearns to play guitar with one arm following stroke: “When people said I wouldn’t be able to play again, I wasn’t going to listen to that” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
