Prelude: Why I want to play the guitar

I’ve wanted to play the guitar for a long time but have never really seriously considered learning it properly until now. I love music and would love to create my own. I have done this to a point previously with a keyboard, drum machine and a computer but have always been frustrated that I couldn’t really play a musical instrument properly. For me, the electric guitar is one of the greatest inventions of the 20^th Century – it is beautiful, sounds amazing and has caused countless cultural revolutions.  I would very much like to be able to play one, so finally and belatedly I am learning how to. This blog is the account of my guitar playing progress, thoughts and experiences.

My first guitar was around my third birthday – I know this because there is a photo of me in my Mum’s house wearing an ‘I am 3’ badge and holding a plastic toy acoustic guitar. Perhaps tellingly, in the picture I am holding the guitar back-to-front. I never made any effort to play it but I probably liked holding it. My next guitar was around the age of 12 – it was a Christmas present – a cheap electric Stratocaster shape in black and came with a headphone amp. It didn’t look very nice – it was and looked quite cheap. Again I made no effort to learn how to play it but I enjoyed holding it and posing with it in my bedroom as I pretended to play along to Guns n Roses and Def Leppard songs. (It was two years before my musical epiphany and my taste in music was very much limited to hard rock). I had a very active imagination at the time and my inability to play didn’t prevent me from boasting to my classmates that I could play the guitar and was going to form a band. I only got found out in the third year of high school when my music teacher introduced the guitar to the class and they soon realised that I couldn’t even play a chord.

Around the age of 16, my friend Rob was in a band and he taught me my first few chords – D, A, E and D7, for which he tried to get me to play along to Columbia by Oasis. That was as far as I got though as I soon lost interest and threw away the guitar.

 IMAGE: D7, my first chord

At the age of 19 I desperately wanted to be in a band. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t play any instrument; I felt that it was my calling in life to be in a band. So I formed one with my two best friends at the time. Mark played bass to an impressive standard – I was amazed when he first played me the bass line to Girls and Boys in full – and had an exhaustive knowledge of music. He introduced me to The Clash, The Doors and The Stone Roses, for which I will forever be grateful. Tom was from quite a musical family and played the guitar. He didn’t know as many tunes as Mark but was a very creative player and I saw him as Graham Coxon to Mark’s Alex James. I wanted to be Damon Albarn but I couldn’t sing and had very little confidence, so I set myself up as the keyboard and drum machine programmer.

Before settling on hitting buttons in the band, I tried to play the guitar and seeing as I didn’t have one I went to a guitar shop in Ipswich and bought one. As I tried out a couple of guitars, the owner quickly realised I couldn’t play a note, so he sold me the worst electric guitar in the shop at a price that was definitely too high. It was a Les Paul Gibson shape but again looked very cheap and had a horrible tacky black colour. Again other than the few chords that Rob had previously taught me, I made no real effort and just strummed away aimlessly. When I soon realised that I could make much better sounds with a drum machine and a keyboard rather than a cheap guitar that I couldn’t play, I soon gave up and sold the guitar to a friend of my brother’s.

Nearly ten years later at the age of 28 it was my brother who encouraged me to pick up the guitar again. My brother Chris had previously been in covers band, where he played the drums to what I saw as a decent standard. I was frustrated that he had given up a musical instrument that he could actually play so I told him to start playing again and he said he would if I bought a guitar. This seemed like a good deal so I set about buying one...

Lessons Learnt: D, A, E and D7 chords.