Do you remember when you started playing guitar

[Jared macneill]

Do you remember when you first started your guitar journey? I do remember.

back in 2007 my brother’s got guitars and I didn’t lol. My older brother and I never really got along and I never really had a good opinion about him due to issues.

basically “ what you can do I can do better” type god complex . So I wanted to prove my brother that I was better than him at playing guitar.

on Easter of 08” I got this little x brand guitar amp with no guitar. So ran to my parents room who were sleeping and they told me to look in the closet.

hanging in the closet was a red silvertone Stratocaster who I called Betty . That’s where my screen name on the Canadian guitar forum comes from “silvertonebetty”

eventually I pissed my brother off to the point where it was not fun for him so he gave up on playing guitar.

 

[chazmo]

I sure do, Jared, but I've got a few years on you.

Back in the early 1970s I attended a summer camp called Appel Farm in South Jersey... One of my counselors was a guitarist and he got me started. He had a Framus steel string and he knew a lot of popular music. I was trained in classical on both piano and trumpet, and he opened my eyes and ears to a lot of new great stuff. I had a Favilla classical guitar which was great to learn on with the wide fretboard and nylon strings...

Anyway, I can't say I ever wanted to prove anything to anyone, and I doubt I pissed anyone off (until I started singing, perhaps), but I really loved really taking it forward during college.

 

[lungimsam]

About 45 years ago I used to watch my cousin play and sing Dylan snd Beatles tunes. I wanted to do it too. So he gave me his old Stella acoustic and taught me the basic chords and gave me some sheet music. It was sheer torture on my hands at first then got easy like walking later.

 

[GAD]

Yup. Probably 1978 or 1979 when i got this sweet rig for Christmas:

You can barely see the LPB-1 that I used to blow the little IC in the amp mere months after I bought it. I was born to rock. Farrah was not impressed. LOL

 

[WaltW]

1964 and I was 11 years old. Nylon string guitar and 1 year of lessons. I learned to read the scale, first position Low E through G on first string, plus major, minor and 7th chords 1st position. Not sure if my nomenclature is correct, it's been too long ago. I also did not continue playing after lessons ended which explain my lack of dexterity but I do have fun playing and just started up playing, a few days ago, with my friend that I hadn't seen for 20 years. Oh, that Kingston Trio stuff we used to play started coming back....but slowly.

 

[Minnesota Flats]

In 1965, at age 16, I took some lessons on a cheap, rented, gut-string guitar from a friend of my mother's. She showed me some cowboy chords and taught me my first song, Peter, Paul & Mary's "Puff the Magic Dragon". She was older than my older brother but younger than my mother, so was kind of of the beatnik/coffee house/folk music generation.

Got my own, first guitar, a battered Gibson J-50 in 1967. First electric was a Coral/Danelectro, Vincent Bell-signature "Firefly" purchased new in 1967. It had a vaguely-335-shaped body, 6-in-linee tuners and "lipstick" pickups, like so:



Sounded more like a Telecaster than a 335.

 

[johnreardon]

I am not sure of the exact date my parents first bought me a guitar, but from looking at remarks such as ‘too frivolous’ and ‘ very disappointing’ in my school reports, I would guess it was Christmas 1961. It may have been a bit early actually playing someone else's guitar, even late 50s.

The Broadway Plectric 1922 guitar I appear to be using in early band photographs came out in 1961 however, I have memories of having owned a Selmer Futurama III, which was released earlier so I probably started on that guitar and bought the Broadway afterwards. Me on right and my dear friend 'Percy'. We both still play in the same band and will be playing at our last gig at the end of this month



Like many in the early 60’s I wanted to join in the ‘new’ music emerging at the time. Some friends from near where I lived and I decided we would form a pop group. One of these friends was Robert Price who for some reason we called ‘Percy’.

 

[bobouz]

My rather focused interest in music started around 1964, but my first guitar didn’t happen until 1971, at the ripe old age of twenty. A friend from college showed me three basic chords and a fingerpicking pattern. From that point on, I was hooked. First guitar was a Yamaha FG-160, but within a couple of years, I was looking for deals at flea markets on US-made instruments, including guitars, mandolins, & banjos.

 

[GGJaguar]

Yes, I remember. Now I hope I don't forget.

 

[Prince of Darkness]

Not sure about exactly when, but I think I was about 16 or 17, which would make it somewhere around 1982-83. My youngest brother (seven years older than me) had acquired an ultra cheap little East German flat top acoustic guitar, with a floating bridge and tailpiece, some years earlier, but his attempts at playing it never really went anywhere and I ended up inheriting it. I'm pretty sure that I had been messing around with the guitar for a few years before this It was soon after this that I picked up and fitted a pin bridge, which just about made this plywood box playable! It was also probably a major factor in the top being ripped off some years later

 

[Guildedagain]

It was announced by my mom that I would start taking Classical guitar lessons when I was 8, in 1968. I don't even know why it was me, I had an older and younger brother, but neither got a guitar.

 

[Stuball48]

It was announced by my mom that I would start taking Classical guitar lessons when I was 8, in 1968. I don't even know why it was me, I had an older and younger brother, but neither got a guitar.

She saw the potential

 

[RBSinTo]

My very first introduction to the guitar was when I was about 11 or 12, and I bought a dreadnought acoustic guitar (whose brand I've long forgotten) from a neighbour's son for $12.00.
I tried without success to teach myself to play it, and very quickly lost interest. I ended up selling it to a local music store for the same $12.00.
It was only about five or six years later when my oldest friend decided to learn to play, that I followed suit, got an inexpensive classical guitar and started on the road to being the really lousy musician that I am to this day.
RBSinTo

 

[jp]

My first venture happened when I was about seven or eight, with a cheapie, non-branded acoustic in an adult education group class. My neighbor and my brother were also in the class. The instructor went around and tuned each guitar, and then we all fumbled horrendously through simple folk song chord charts while the teacher sang. It was pure misery.

My brother and I then had a private teacher, and things went swimmingly after that. When we got a Hondo II LP copy and a little Crate amp, I really caught the bug. Not my pics but this was my setup.

 

[Ross]

Here’s my story:

In the late 1960s I was in university, at a small campus near Montreal. Several students played guitars, and I got interested (I’d developed a taste for folk/country music). My sister owned a cheap plywood acoustic that she never played, so on a weekend visit to the family, I appropriated it.

I worked on chord changes while trying to keep a steady rhythm, with varying amounts of success. (The F chord remained a challenge until I was well into my 60s). I also learned that stings needed changing occasionally (one of many worthwhile things that I learned that year).

Things changed a few months later. Three women students formed an informal a capella vocal group. They’d sing folk tunes in the student union, or outside in warm weather. A friend of mine was the cousin of one of the women, and one day (unbeknownst to me) he made the offhand comment to her “you should get Ross to play guitar with you”.

The next day the three approached me. I was overwhelmed at receiving attention from them, and I said yes. Then reality hit, in the form of my almost-unplayable instrument. I promptly cut classes for the rest of the day and took the bus into the city. On pawnshop row I bought a Japanese plywood dread, a set of strings and a pitchpipe tuner. This took all of my spare cash, forcing me to give up smoking (another good thing that happened to me that year).

The singers gave me printed copies of their songs, and I worked hard to learn them. They had no hard-and-fast schedule for singing, just when the time seemed right. It was usually spontaneous - I’d be walking down the hall between classes, and one of the three would approach me with “the union, 5 pm”. After my last class I’d grab the plywood box and head out.

The singers always stood, in a semicircle, so as to see one another for visual cues. I sat on a chair, the floor, a stair, whatever was available. I couldn’t always see their cues (I was looking at my left hand) but normally sat with them to my left, so I could glance up occasionally to pick up cues. They’d often signal me with a hand gesture or a sideways glance (or glare, if I missed a cue). Eventually I felt more at ease. When “play these chords!” became “could you figure out the chords to this piece?” I knew that I had been accepted.

Mostly I learned to listen; for the tap of a toe, an inhalation, any signal. And as we grew more accustomed to one another, it became almost automatic. I began to realize “hey, we’re a band!”

I had a well-paying job the next summer, and I was able to buy a better-quality guitar (still plywood), with a case, a capo and more strings. We kept it up for two more academic years, then one of the women graduated. It wasn’t the same without her, and the rest of us quietly folded.

I got my degree that year, but I learned much, much more than academics – still a mediocre player, though.

 

[crank]

My sister had a really hard to play, crappy, fat and wide necked classical that I struggled to master my first chords on when I was 10. I saved up my allowance and lawn mowing money and bought a little Kalamazoo parlour guitar. When I was in 6th grade, 55-years ago.

I don't suck but I should be better.

 

[5thumbs]

I don't suck but I should be better.

Hah! That's another one to carve on my tombstone.

 

[tonepoet]

I wanted to play guitar from the time I saw the Beatles in Feb 1964 on the Ed Sullivan Show on TV when I was about 8 and I used to watch and listen to my Dad play guitar around the campfire in the summertime as a kid.

My biggest roadblock was myself. My self-esteem was awful as a kid and I just felt I wasn't good enough to accomplish that feat.

As a teenager, my heroes were the Beatles and guitarist like Hendrix, Clapton, Ritchie Blackmore, Duane Allman, Dickie Betts, etc., and I put those guys on pedestals. A mere mortal, such as I, would never play guitar.

I could make songs in my head but not play them on instruments. My girlfriend when I was 18 said, "Look, you have to play guitar or piano if you want to be a songwriter"

That Christmas, my Mother told my three brothers and I that this would be "a thin Christmas. So, pick one gift that will not cost more than $100"

I walked into a guitar store in Birmingham, Michigan called Strings & Things and saw an Epiphone FT-145 acoustic hanging on the wall. It was $110.

That was Christmas 1975 and my neighbor Mike (same age) taught me to play Neil Young's song "Helpless". The next song I learned from a Dylan songbook was "Blowin' in the Wind". And I took it from there.

 

[tonepoet]

a little Crate amp

I still have one of those little wood Crate amps in storage!

 

[tonepoet]

It was sheer torture on my hands at first then got easy like walking later.

Yeah... I recall the torture. I strung the guitar with nylon classical strings to make it easier to learn barre chords and then went to Martin Silk 'n Steel strings for awhile before going back to steel strings.