I love the guitar. I just wish I had more time to practice. When I do play it, I have a lot of fun. I’ll go through spurts where I’ll play it every day for an hour or two, or maybe I’ll just pick it up and play it for a few minutes while I’m at work and I need a break.
I’m a constant beginner, learning a bit more all the time and often re-training myself. I took a few acoustic guitar lessons as a kid but it never caught on until I became an adult. Now I really enjoy it, especially with all of the great resources available on the intarweb and YouTube.
A good 4 or so years ago my wife bought me a really nice Takamine EG530SC acoustic guitar for Christmas, along with a few months of private lessons from a local guitar teacher. He was good, but I didn’t get out of the lessons what I wanted, so I stopped. I continued to play when I had time, but my interest slowed down once again. I wanted to learn easy-to-play rock music and he wanted to teach me the classics.
I’m not sure why it took me so long, but earlier this year (2007) I started finding a ton of great YouTube videos and other online resources for learning to play the guitar, so I picked it up again. The problem this time is that the time I wanted to play was when I was winding down at night after work, just before bed. This was around 2-3am! Needless to say, playing an acoustic guitar that early in the morning isn’t a good idea when the rest of my family is in REM mode. The solution was to get an electric guitar, and the Ibanez GAX70 was that guitar. I initially bought a headphone amp for it but ended up piping the audio through GarageBand on my Mac, which is the perfect solution.
Now I can crank it with my headphones on anytime of the day and nobody cares! I can also easily record my riffs, so once I get good enough I’ll post a few of them here (I bet you can’t wait for that!)
Some Guitar Links
Rock on good people!