Hi all,

I happily retired early, aged 55, in May this year. Every day is a Saturday now (woohoo!) so I can fully indulge existing hobbies, and rekindle an old one - playing guitar. First, a little bit of relevant background on that...

I took up electric guitar as a complete tone-deaf noob around 20 years ago. After 3 years of daily, self-taught practice sessions I could improvise fairly convincingly over blues backing tracks and created passable instrumentals on a small 8-track rig. However, (I now know) I was practicing inefficiently and very poorly, focussing too much on what I was good at and too little on what I wasn't. And "programming in" bad technique in the process (mainly by trying to play too fast). I never learned to play a whole tune in all that time either so I could never oblige friends requests to "play something", although I really, really wanted to. But I kept falling back into my "comfortable rut" instead. One day, I bought a cheap midi keyboard and rack-mount synth to add different sounds into my tracks. After just one morning playing with that keyboard, I was making better tunes than I could make with my guitars (with no prior keyboard experience). Ouch! The will to play guitar effectively evaporated at that very moment, I lost interest and within a year I'd sold the lot. I haven't gone near a guitar, or any instrument, for over 15 years since.

So, fast forward to last week. I decided to buy a silent guitar and try again - starting from scratch. I am determined NOT to repeat my mistakes of last time. I will practice carefully and methodically, learning whole tunes as I go along too. I bought a Yamaha SLG200S, (steel string) to start with; reasoning if I started on the stiffer strings of the acoustic-like Yamaha, then electric will be a breeze when I move over to it. As it happens, my dream electric came up for sale in the same week - so I bought that too. Ooops - that bad habit didn't waste time re-appearing

I had a play around as soon as the guitars arrived and was surprised that I'd remembered a few chords and scales with more coming back as I noodled about. Along with the fear that my bad habits would re-emerge just as quickly! I had to get structure into my practice and set realistic milestones and goals ASAP. So I signed up with GuitarTricks. Phew! It's already helping me analyse how I play and advance in smaller, structured steps to iron out, (or at least recognise), the many flaws in my technique and approach before they become "muscle memory" again.

So all-in-all, I feel I'm off to a much more positive (re)start with an infinitely better chance of ongoing achievements and I'm really looking forward to the hard work to come.

Wish me luck.

Cheers
Beats