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…