Hello all, this is the first blog post for “yours truly”. I don’t really know what to write about. I guess I’ll start when I first aspired to play the guitar and my first guitars. Lets back-track a few years, It’s around 2008(9), I’m sitting in my mom’s car going somewhere ,she’s a reporter for a local newspaper and always out and about around the county. We were flying down the road pretty fast, classic rock station blaring, and like a God sent angel, Over the Hills and Far Away by Led Zeppelin came on the radio. Something about the song struck a chord in me (Ha! see what I did there? Chord…. Get it?). It might have been Jimmy’s awesome acoustic intro, or it may have been the driving chords in the chorus that Led (Ha, I did it again….. Led, like the band…)...that led me to grow a desire to get a guitar and play like Jimmy did.
That didn't come quickly, flash forward about 3 years. We’re at my moms friends house. I decided to be a nosy little bugger and look around at all their stuff in the garage, among all the sports gear and tools there was an old beat up guitar case, inside was a Delta parlor style acoustic guitar. The guitar has definitely seen better days, but to me it was like a treasure chest. At this point I've been asking for a guitar adamantly for years, and I’ve never actually seen or used a real one in person before, and here is one, right in front of me in some ones garage in the country. I quickly ran inside with it, approached my mom and her friend and asked if I could have it or maybe just borrow it to learn. And the moment I’ve been waiting for since I found the death trap of a guitar, They both agreed to let me have it.
Within hours of having it home, I discovered a lot about the guitar, like, it was missing four of the bridge pins and, you can’t make guitar strings out of twine or fishing wire. I found some sticks in the yard for the bridge pins, and my friends dad had an extra pack of guitar strings that he gave me for it. I strung it up for the first time (failed), tried again, this time I succeeded. I didn’t know how to tune it yet, went back over to my friends house to have his dad tune it for me. And actually playing for the first time was the greatest feeling in the world to me. I never let the thing out of my hands, I kept it right next to my bed at night.
Within days of having it and learning to play some songs like Don’t Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult ,we went back over to her friends house, and I was playing Xbox with her sons, I glanced over into the closet and saw an electric guitar. My eyes grew big and my heart started going crazy… That is the thing I've always wanted -an electric guitar so I can sound like Jimmy Page and do crazy solos. And, like a broken record, the process repeated. I asked the same question, and of course, the same answer.
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| My first electric guitar -back in 2010 |
When I got back home, I realized something… I need an amplifier. I went to school the next day and talked to my friend Dylan (Who was a crazy good guitarist) about needing an amplifier, he said he had a small one and a cord in his locker that I could have. I came home with the amplifier and the cord, plugged it in and played, non stop, until my moms ears bled. I learned fairly quickly how to play a lot of stuff on it, mastered Smoke on the Water and went on to other things like Robert Johnson and Skip James, later going onto people like Eric Clapton and B.B. King- that kind of music just stuck with me since. With time I got better and better at it and played the guitar so much that now, I can’t imagine a life without a guitar. If all guitars just vanished from the Earth, It would be like losing a limb to me. Thank you all for reading, hope you enjoyed.
