Well, I think I had a firend who listened to some band called Deep Purple and I was blown away! Such musical sounding rock, you know? So that was the first album I ever acquired...I listened to it over and over..and still had no inkling of guitar..then I heard a record of Andres Segovia.."My Favorite Spanish Encores.." get if you can!!!..I know it's been long out of print..but wow, really beautiful music, just swept me away...Segovia's arr. of Torre Bermeja blows away any version performed after it was recorded...I mean *#@**.ing breathtaking!!!...so, and I know this is getting to be long...but then I got hold of a guitar and took records and learned right off them...playing them over and over...I have the extreme good luck to be able to get most guitar parts listening to them form the radio or recordings.......I used an old recorder to play-stop-rewind-play-pause-rewind-play when I started to decode all the old Jimmy Page solos off every Zeppelin album...and got quite good at learning classical the same way...I learned the opening to Courante that way...any how...I never got into at a professional level though, I'm quite proficient at rock...I'm into Albert Lee solos now...WOW! They are incredibly engaging to play through...! But the thing is this...I never did it for image...some guys in and around the garage bands I was in growing up..they were all into flash, and being, "better than you!"
I always hated this, because at the time I wasn't very good.....I just enjoyed, loved, and was obsessed more with the whole "decoding" solos and songs, and I loved the feeling of "discovery" when you found out something very basic like the pull offs of the G and D string at the 2nd position. The whole thing was like the satisfaction you get from solving intriquingly fun puzzles..i started learning classical songs from tape, then went to jimmy Page's Bron-y-aur, then Stairway and everything else, then Yes, and The Clap, and Jeff Beck, then Rush, then Albert Lee, then Van Halen, then Satriani, now back to Lee..oh hell I forgot Steve Morse..he's after Rush and before Albert Lee. I found out about Lee because Albert plays on an awesome country tune called General Lee...with Morse! ...and you know, through keeping it close to me these 15 yrs..or more.. I have developed into so much more than I was playing in that garage years ago...Just keep listening to different stuff, listen to the styles of guitar jamming, or guitar players you feel really rock, learn all you can from those styles or players, then move on for a bit...when you come back to the previous thing it will look so much more different than when you were there last......it's weird...., don't get frustrated, keep your guitar with you, keep your listening interesting and varied and then you turn around one day and you're a guitar player!!
