A fresh start


khantsithu001
Registered User
Joined: 09/21/17
Posts: 1
khantsithu001
Registered User
Joined: 09/21/17
Posts: 1
09/22/2017 7:46 am

Hi all,

my name is Uwe and I am 48 years old. I am located in Berlin, Germany. I have been admiring guitar players for a very long time. I grew up with Mike Oldfield and Brian May, but I never even dared to think about learning to play the guitar myself. As a kid I kind of “had” to play accordion. I hated it, but at least I learned some basics about sheet music and harmonies. After I got rid of that I never touched an instrument again.

Then, for Christmas 2015, my wife treated herself with a PlayStation. Finally, I could play Guitar Hero on that thing. And even though I was no good at all I spent dozens of hours with it for half a year. I do not know where it came from, but while daydreaming what I would do once I won the gazillions in the lottery, learning to play the guitar was always one of the top items. After Guitar Hero I then figured that I would not need to win the lottery to do it but just need to get started. So out of impulse I ordered an electric guitar starter set from Amazon, including a Yamaha ERG 121 guitar and a Yamaha GA-15 amplifier.

I quickly got recommended an online course by a German guitar teacher, and I bought all his instruction videos compiled on DVD together with an accompanying book for less than 20 Euros. That got me started with D and A7 chord any a variety of children’s songs. But then I somehow got stuck. And whatever I did with the electric guitar, it did not sound at all like the instruction videos, so I bought an acoustic guitar, a Yamaha C40. The change from steel to nylon was interesting. I got accustomed to it, but electric guitar always felt more home.

The break came in spring when our church district was organizing guitar lessons during Passiontide in order to play a service afterwards. These were only six lessons which were followed by another eight lessons till summer. I did learn the other open chords in these lessons. But in the first six we almost started anew each time and in the last eight I was the least experienced and always struggled. I managed to at least physically grab C and Dmin, even though I still have difficulties to change to them quickly. The F chord, the first “small” barre chord was the point where I resigned, I just could not bring my fingers to do this.

So I forgot about barre chords and picked ten songs with open chords only that I wanted to play (strumming only) when I visited my sister in August. Let’s say for eight of them this work reasonably. These ten songs are still my practice playlist. And lately I used the electric guitar more often to play them. I played around with the distortion on my amplifier but this did not satisfy me at all. I read a lot about multi effect boards and modelling amplifiers and I finally got a Fender Mustang GT40 last week. The sheer volume of different sounds is overwhelming, not counting the endless tweaking options.

Now that I had the sounds I still could not play any decent thing on the guitar. So I needed a new approach or a fresh start to learn more about playing and get some results. While browsing the web for ideas I stumbled over a review of guitartricks.com. This quickly got me interested and I was impressed by the incredible reviews by many different sources. Also, the whole approach and the presentation appealed to me, so I decided yesterday to give it a go and subscribed for a whole year.

Now I am here and started last night from the very beginning. I look forward to reinforce what I know already, but I am also a little scared once the F chord is on the curriculum again. Not to mention full barre chords. I hope that I will be able to learn plenty of songs, so I will keep having fun doing it. And maybe, on my 60th birthday I might found a pensioner band…


# 1
FloydHead
Registered User
Joined: 10/24/16
Posts: 4
FloydHead
Registered User
Joined: 10/24/16
Posts: 4
09/22/2017 1:40 pm

Welcome Uwe! I've been using Guitar Tricks for almost a year and if you stick with it you'll definitely make progress. You'll get a lot of good advice on these forums. Best one I can offer is to try and practice every day. Even if only for 20 minutes you'll make much better progress than playing the same amount (or more) of time only on the weekend.


# 2
Tom Sklenar
Registered User
Joined: 07/25/17
Posts: 52
Tom Sklenar
Registered User
Joined: 07/25/17
Posts: 52
09/30/2017 6:33 pm

Hello Uwe, welcome to the forum!


# 3

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