…that I started teaching myself how to play guitar.<\/p>\n
I’ve written about it before; when I was a little kid – the day of the first moon landing, in fact – my dad had brought home a guitar someone had left in his locker years earlier.\u00a0 It’d been sitting around the house for eight years, serving as a fort or battleship for toy army men, as a rifle in games of Soldier…as pretty much everything but a guitar.<\/p>\n
But seized with the urge to play, I repaired it – replaced three tuning machines, hammered a fret back into place, and restrung it – and started teaching myself.<\/p>\n
You\u00a0 may recall the classic Mitch Hedberg bit; “I’ve been teaching myself guitar.\u00a0 It’s not going so well.\u00a0 I have a crappy teacher”.\u00a0 That’s probably the norm.\u00a0 I lucked out – but not because I was a good teacher.\u00a0 I had some good source materials.\u00a0 It helped that I’d been playing cello for four years, of course; I knew theory, rhythm, key, the scale, all of that sort of thing.<\/p>\n
And I had John Denver.\u00a0 Say what you will about the guy and his music, but he wrote stuff that was eeeeeasssssy to follow on the guitar.<\/p>\n
But most of all?\u00a0 I had a copy of the Gene Leis “Nexus” Guitar Chord book, a cardback folio that was the perfect book on the subject; it started slow (how to hold the guitar, how not to), how to form the simple chords, how to hold a pick and strum…<\/p>\n
…and, interspersed throughout, the little written bits of advice and encouragement a live teacher might give you.\u00a0 (He warned the newbie about the first-position “F” chord – a plateau of hand-cramping agony that kills off a lot of new guitarists; “this one’s going to be tough.\u00a0 Hang in there”).<\/p>\n
I got the book at the local music store; it was actually a reissue of a 1961 publication.\u00a0 It’s long out of print, of course.<\/p>\n
Which is a shame.\u00a0 I’ve been teaching my son to play, and it’d be handy.\u00a0 I’m tempted to try to write my own sometime, here – but that’s another article.<\/p>\n