Hi,
I've just joined up with Guitar Tricks. Although I first started playing in 1979, I never kept it up beyond 1983 due to work and family, and a stolen guitar!
My first guitar was an old nylon string acoustic which was strung with steel strings, so it never played well. After 6 months, and with my first paycheck from my first job, I bought a 12-string Ibanez acoustic - from the frying pan to the fire. That guitar was stolen back in 1995, although I hadn't touched it in years.
Over the years I've bought a few guitars but not played much due to work and family commitments, but now I work exculsively from home, all the kids are grown up and have moved away, so I've decided to start again.
I now have a Yamaha FG-441S dreadnought acoustic; a Washburn 12-string acoustic (also dreadnought); a Parker P-42 electric; and an electric guitar I built myself over 5 days at a luthier's workshop - from designing the guitar and selecting the pieces of raw wood for the neck and the body, shaping the neck and body, to cutting and inserting the frets and installing and soldering all the electrics. It was an amazing experience and I have the guitar I want, which plays as well as anything you can buy off the shelf.
I'm self-taught, so I have lot of bad habits, which means I'm starting by working my way through every lesson from the very beginning. Of course, I'm skipping through a lot of it because I know which way is up and how to tune, that sort of thing, but it's nice to finally fill in some of the gaps. I've only spent two evenings so far, and could have progressed further if I had known where to jump in to a spot more relevant to my skill level, but the site does not offer a way of evaluating your level so you can work out what to skip. If there's anything I would say the site needs, it would be this.
Looking forward to getting answers to the questions I know I will have over the coming months.
Joe McLean
