To all those old dogs out there - how was it when you started out?

[Dominik Gräber]

With my brother starting to play guitar again and many newcomers to the school I thought a lot about the first year of picking up the intrument again. And I came to think, man we read a lot of stories by new guitarists, their struggles and how it is for them to start out. But what we barely get to hear is the side of the more experienced players on the school.

So I thought it'd be interesting to hear those talk a little about how it was for them starting out. What was the most difficult for you, what would you do different if you could start again, what was your breakthrough when you thought "now I got it"?

 

[idssdi]

I started on a really shitty nylon string guitar that was incredibly difficult to play. I wanted to play A7x on it so I transposed songs to frets that I could play on(mostly easy intro melodies and stuff like that).

Looking back I probably should have started practicing with a metronome sooner, care a little bit more about theory(I couldn't even read chord charts) and I would have spend more attention to my vibrato(I was like why do people wiggle their fingers around, it doesn't add anything anyway).

I'm not even sure when my breakthrough was, I think around the times when my guitar teacher said he always let my lessons go longer because he enjoyed playing with me.

 

[Ed Seith]

It was a long time ago in my mind, and a very different time for EVERYTHING, but I have to run today. I will stop back and comment on learning guitar in 1984 tonight.

 

[John Robinson]

It was a long time ago in my mind, and a very different time for EVERYTHING, but I have to run today. I will stop back and comment on learning guitar in 1984 tonight.

What a time that year was...i remember bits and pieces of it

 

[David Deatherage]

Looking forward to your story Ed!!! I challenge you! Inspire me! HAHAHA! I just got my ass whipped on some strumming and the pentatonic scale lesson sooooo misery loves company. My hand is so effin cramped man.

 

[Adin Shepherd]

It would have been around 1990/91 when I first picked up a guitar. I was living in a small rural town that had one guitar teacher, I guess I was lucky there was one. I took a couple of terms of lessons before I started to learn on my own. Accessing learning material was much more difficult, and costly, when compared to today. My main sources were guitar magazines (at the time Guitar World, Guitar For The Practicing Musician and Guitar One were the big 3) and my collection of Metallica tab books. I never really bothered with 'how to' books, rather learning by playing songs, my 'practice' was opening a tab book playing the corresponding CD and trying to keep up.

I never really took learning seriously and always treated it as a hobby, a mindset that I regret today and would be the one thing I would change if I could. I am only now working on fixing the issues in my playing that developed as a result of my lax attitude. Theory is another thing that I am also starting to get into now, along with some techniques I had never dabbled in before.

Still waiting on that 'now I got it!' breakthrough moment, haha.

 

[Sayonil Mitra]

I started playing 12yrs ago on my dad's old jumbo acoustic guitar (which was bigger than me at that time!!!! ). Super thick fretboard, it was like a gym for my tiny fingers back then . Breakthrough is when I first listened to Holy wars by Megadeth. That song blew my mind and also opened floodgates to other bands including A7X.

 

[Ed Seith]

Okay, so it was 1984 or 1985. It really is hard to remember, to be honest. I was a teenager just starting high school. I had a small record collection - not because it was cool or because neckbeards pretended they knew about sonic purity, but because they were the only logical choice, at least until I got a cassette walkman a year or so later, and then after that started to drive.

CDs were 3 or 4 years away for the commoner. We had a VCR in the house with a WIRED remote control. MTV played music videos, but we couldn't afford MTV, so there was "Friday Night Videos" on NBC and "Night Tracks" on TBS - basic cable. The videos weren't really good for seeing what someone was playing, because video editors really didn't pay attention to using shots that were of the performers miming the actual parts - they didn't care.

There would be no YouTube for several decades. There were tab books that were of varying quality from "horrible" to "tolerably useful." If you slowed a song down, the pitch changed. Drastically. Guitar For the Practicing Musician and Guitar World magazines were the only place for quality tabs, and they chose 3-4 songs a month to transcribe. Every couple months you'd get a magazine that had a song you wanted to learn that you also had a copy of on cassette or vinyl.

My mom and Dad rented me a Fender Mustang and a small Peavey combo amp (Bandit? I don't remember) so I could see if I liked playing and would stick to learning. I started taking lessons at that same music store, the only real place in town we knew of. He was a great player, but he was a jazz guy and all he wanted to teach me was Mary Had a Little Lamb. I mentioned bands I liked and he dismissed them as crap. After a few lessons, I quit, grabbing an Iron Maiden songbook on my way out the store. I think it was $27, and it fell in the "horrible" category.

Soon I bought an Aria Pro II explorer copy from a cousin i saw once or twice a year He was a drummer but had a guitar to sell for some reason (I later found out that reason was that he sold and did a lot of drugs, until he got caught and went to jail). Much later I bought a used Sunn tube amp from an ad in the local paper and some DOD pedals and a shitload of 9V batteries.

The Iron Maiden book was transcribed by someone who really didn't play guitar - they figured out the notes and transcribed all the tab as if it were played in the open position. After months of frustration trying to learn songs like Phantom of the Opera in open position, I tried changing the tabs to make it easier. That was when I realized how bad the tab was.

The first song I learned was Flight of Icarus. It would be a decade before I'd go back and learn it correctly, haha.

Transcriptions started getting better, as the competing magazines tried to beat each other out for accuracy. They started feeding those out to the songbook companies later so the tab books were better. There still weren't any instructional videos I was aware of, and there were so many insanely fast players. My young mind compared what I heard to what I could do and rationalized that there was NO WAY these people could POSSIBLY be playing exactly the same thing twice in a row.. They HAD to be just "winging it," so that's what I started doing. Instead of trying to learn some superfast solo note for note, I would just "play fast in this position" or "play fast from here to here."

I bought Doug Marks' "Metal Method" out of the back of a magazine. It was $30 and took almost 2 months to get to me. It was a bunch of warbly examples on a badly copied cassette and some photocopied sheets of paper stapled together. I was heartbroken. It didn't make real sense to me, either.

You found other people to jam with on the post-it board at the music store. I tried a couple and got to an audition for one, and jammed with a few guys. I didn't get the gig, but it was exhilarating. By this time, I was about to head off to college, though. I took my guitar and spent the last of my money on the first and only headphone amp in existence - a Tom Scholz Rockman. It had the most amazing clean tone ever (I even found someone who modeled it for the AxeFX and use it as my clean tone still today), but the distorted tone sucked. Anyway, I was practicing in my room with the door open and an upperclassman walked by. He came in and asked to listen to me play on the headphones, and then asked me to be in his band. We took second place in the school Battle of the Bands a few months later, playing Dokken's In My Dreams, Tesla's Comin Atcha Live and Whitesnake's Crying in the Rain.

It was exhilarating, and I never cared about college again.

 

[Adin Shepherd]

Doug Marks Metal Method, I think I have a ripped copy of that on DVD here somewhere, along with a handful of Lick Library DVDs. All kinda useless now thanks to Youtube.

 

[David Deatherage]

Okay, so it was 1984 or 1985. It really is hard to remember, to be honest. I was a teenager just starting high school. I had a small record collection - not because it was cool or because neckbeards pretended they knew about sonic purity, but because they were the only logical choice, at least until I got a cassette walkman a year or so later, and then after that started to drive.

CDs were 3 or 4 years away for the commoner. We had a VCR in the house with a WIRED remote control. MTV played music videos, but we couldn't afford MTV, so there was "Friday Night Videos" on NBC and "Night Tracks" on TBS - basic cable. The videos weren't really good for seeing what someone was playing, because video editors really didn't pay attention to using shots that were of the performers miming the actual parts - they didn't care.

There would be no YouTube for several decades. There were tab books that were of varying quality from "horrible" to "tolerably useful." If you slowed a song down, the pitch changed. Drastically. Guitar For the Practicing Musician and Guitar World magazines were the only place for quality tabs, and they chose 3-4 songs a month to transcribe. Every couple months you'd get a magazine that had a song you wanted to learn that you also had a copy of on cassette or vinyl.

My mom and Dad rented me a Fender Mustang and a small Peavey combo amp (Bandit? I don't remember) so I could see if I liked playing and would stick to learning. I started taking lessons at that same music store, the only real place in town we knew of. He was a great player, but he was a jazz guy and all he wanted to teach me was Mary Had a Little Lamb. I mentioned bands I liked and he dismissed them as crap. After a few lessons, I quit, grabbing an Iron Maiden songbook on my way out the store. I think it was $27, and it fell in the "horrible" category.

Soon I bought an Aria Pro II explorer copy from a cousin i saw once or twice a year He was a drummer but had a guitar to sell for some reason (I later found out that reason was that he sold and did a lot of drugs, until he got caught and went to jail). Much later I bought a used Sunn tube amp from an ad in the local paper and some DOD pedals and a shitload of 9V batteries.

The Iron Maiden book was transcribed by someone who really didn't play guitar - they figured out the notes and transcribed all the tab as if it were played in the open position. After months of frustration trying to learn songs like Phantom of the Opera in open position, I tried changing the tabs to make it easier. That was when I realized how bad the tab was.

The first song I learned was Flight of Icarus. It would be a decade before I'd go back and learn it correctly, haha.

Transcriptions started getting better, as the competing magazines tried to beat each other out for accuracy. They started feeding those out to the songbook companies later so the tab books were better. There still weren't any instructional videos I was aware of, and there were so many insanely fast players. My young mind compared what I heard to what I could do and rationalized that there was NO WAY these people could POSSIBLY be playing exactly the same thing twice in a row.. They HAD to be just "winging it," so that's what I started doing. Instead of trying to learn some superfast solo note for note, I would just "play fast in this position" or "play fast from here to here."

I bought Doug Marks' "Metal Method" out of the back of a magazine. It was $30 and took almost 2 months to get to me. It was a bunch of warbly examples on a badly copied cassette and some photocopied sheets of paper stapled together. I was heartbroken. It didn't make real sense to me, either.

You found other people to jam with on the post-it board at the music store. I tried a couple and got to an audition for one, and jammed with a few guys. I didn't get the gig, but it was exhilarating. By this time, I was about to head off to college, though. I took my guitar and spent the last of my money on the first and only headphone amp in existence - a Tom Scholz Rockman. It had the most amazing clean tone ever (I even found someone who modeled it for the AxeFX and use it as my clean tone still today), but the distorted tone sucked. Anyway, I was practicing in my room with the door open and an upperclassman walked by. He came in and asked to listen to me play on the headphones, and then asked me to be in his band. We took second place in the school Battle of the Bands a few months later, playing Dokken's In My Dreams, Tesla's Comin Atcha Live and Whitesnake's Crying in the Rain.

It was exhilarating, and I never cared about college again.

Amazing story man! Definitely inspired!!

 

[Ed Seith]

Doug Marks Metal Method, I think I have a ripped copy of that on DVD here somewhere, along with a handful of Lick Library DVDs. All kinda useless now thanks to Youtube.

To be fair, what he was offering was the best thing at the time for someone with no metal guitar players in town and no "network" of musician friends, but I wanted something that would hold my hand and show me, and that wasn't it.

 

[Dominik Gräber]

Okay, so it was 1984 or 1985. It really is hard to remember, to be honest. I was a teenager just starting high school. I had a small record collection - not because it was cool or because neckbeards pretended they knew about sonic purity, but because they were the only logical choice, at least until I got a cassette walkman a year or so later, and then after that started to drive.

CDs were 3 or 4 years away for the commoner. We had a VCR in the house with a WIRED remote control. MTV played music videos, but we couldn't afford MTV, so there was "Friday Night Videos" on NBC and "Night Tracks" on TBS - basic cable. The videos weren't really good for seeing what someone was playing, because video editors really didn't pay attention to using shots that were of the performers miming the actual parts - they didn't care.

There would be no YouTube for several decades. There were tab books that were of varying quality from "horrible" to "tolerably useful." If you slowed a song down, the pitch changed. Drastically. Guitar For the Practicing Musician and Guitar World magazines were the only place for quality tabs, and they chose 3-4 songs a month to transcribe. Every couple months you'd get a magazine that had a song you wanted to learn that you also had a copy of on cassette or vinyl.

My mom and Dad rented me a Fender Mustang and a small Peavey combo amp (Bandit? I don't remember) so I could see if I liked playing and would stick to learning. I started taking lessons at that same music store, the only real place in town we knew of. He was a great player, but he was a jazz guy and all he wanted to teach me was Mary Had a Little Lamb. I mentioned bands I liked and he dismissed them as crap. After a few lessons, I quit, grabbing an Iron Maiden songbook on my way out the store. I think it was $27, and it fell in the "horrible" category.

Soon I bought an Aria Pro II explorer copy from a cousin i saw once or twice a year He was a drummer but had a guitar to sell for some reason (I later found out that reason was that he sold and did a lot of drugs, until he got caught and went to jail). Much later I bought a used Sunn tube amp from an ad in the local paper and some DOD pedals and a shitload of 9V batteries.

The Iron Maiden book was transcribed by someone who really didn't play guitar - they figured out the notes and transcribed all the tab as if it were played in the open position. After months of frustration trying to learn songs like Phantom of the Opera in open position, I tried changing the tabs to make it easier. That was when I realized how bad the tab was.

The first song I learned was Flight of Icarus. It would be a decade before I'd go back and learn it correctly, haha.

Transcriptions started getting better, as the competing magazines tried to beat each other out for accuracy. They started feeding those out to the songbook companies later so the tab books were better. There still weren't any instructional videos I was aware of, and there were so many insanely fast players. My young mind compared what I heard to what I could do and rationalized that there was NO WAY these people could POSSIBLY be playing exactly the same thing twice in a row.. They HAD to be just "winging it," so that's what I started doing. Instead of trying to learn some superfast solo note for note, I would just "play fast in this position" or "play fast from here to here."

I bought Doug Marks' "Metal Method" out of the back of a magazine. It was $30 and took almost 2 months to get to me. It was a bunch of warbly examples on a badly copied cassette and some photocopied sheets of paper stapled together. I was heartbroken. It didn't make real sense to me, either.

You found other people to jam with on the post-it board at the music store. I tried a couple and got to an audition for one, and jammed with a few guys. I didn't get the gig, but it was exhilarating. By this time, I was about to head off to college, though. I took my guitar and spent the last of my money on the first and only headphone amp in existence - a Tom Scholz Rockman. It had the most amazing clean tone ever (I even found someone who modeled it for the AxeFX and use it as my clean tone still today), but the distorted tone sucked. Anyway, I was practicing in my room with the door open and an upperclassman walked by. He came in and asked to listen to me play on the headphones, and then asked me to be in his band. We took second place in the school Battle of the Bands a few months later, playing Dokken's In My Dreams, Tesla's Comin Atcha Live and Whitesnake's Crying in the Rain.

It was exhilarating, and I never cared about college again.

Thank you so much for sharing this with us. I can only imagine what it takes to seriously pick up the guitar then, you really needed to want it I guess.

 

[Calvin Phillips]

I cant remember but I think I already had the acoustic at the time. But my first girlfriend (of 10 months) left me so I had a lot of time to kill.

The first ever song I wrote was one I still play (maybe I'll record a quick video of it this weekend). I then learned some easy songs that I cant really remember the songs.

You cant see the guitar in this video but you can hear it.


I then bought a cheap ass guitar (that I still have I think it has a wiring issue buzz out the ass). I started jamming alice in chains.


It's funny cause when I listen to this video I hear kind of what notes I was aiming for even though I didn't look a single thing up for the lead stuff I play here. It's horrible sounding but the grouping makes sense to me in some ways.


First a7x song that I still know the rhythm for. I kind of want to go back to it. I think honestly I could do it without the tabs now I'm pretty sure hes just playing octaves everywhere on this song.

Then I got the revenger..


The tone.. funny story about the amp. I walked into the store and asked them about amps. The guy showed me the spider 2. It was 250 used. I said damn that's a good deal. Its basically what my spider 5 was. And I got that for like 450 used now. So that deal.. I bought it and took it home. Dad came home from work and I told him. The next day he went to work and his co worker was like.

YO I cant wait to get off work I saw a spider 2 at long and mac quads for 250 soooo getting it.

Story over the guitar too. I phoned a music shop and they had the revenger for like... 750. Not a bad deal. I put a deposit down. Then I walked into long and mcquades. I told them the deal and they said return the deposit and buy from us. 625. I was like deal! Since they didnt have the guitar in stock and it wasn't even ordered I figured a return would he no issue. They tried charging me a restocking fee. I even ask of theyd honour the 625. They got mad weird and they didnt even return me the full deposit. She just made a number up. Dad said to take it as a lesson... never sure what he meant by that. But I think it's more people like to take advantage of you. This shop quoted me 2200 for the apocalypse ALONE. the retail was 1600. I found another place 20 minutes away that sold it to me 2200 ALL IN. Case and everything. And was already in Canada so no rosewood fee.

That's basically my story of starting. You'll realize two things. I never looked at tabs. And I never learned my theory. Some stuff I did look up. When it came to the solos... yeah. Some things are not bad. Like this jam.


Wasnt til this school opening up that I decided to change that. I also started playing with my pinky more. And I've been pushing limits ever since. All the songs I wrote were made better. The duals made sense. The solos actually were always the same. I cant put into words how glad I am that I did all of that. It's made the impossible seem reachable.

You also will probably find YouTube hate on most of these videos lol.

 

[Adin Shepherd]

To be fair, what he was offering was the best thing at the time for someone with no metal guitar players in town and no "network" of musician friends, but I wanted something that would hold my hand and show me, and that wasn't it.

Oh, for sure, nothing against the content at all. Unfortunately most of the mail order instructional stuff almost required you had some prior knowledge. There is so much specific content on youtube now that it makes most of this stuff redundant, but as you say, at the time it was all we had.

 

[Firsty Lasty]

Even though I'm not even 35 I feel like youngsters today will never be able to wrap their minds around what life was like when I was young, just like how I can barely imagine what it would have been like to live in a world without video games.

It really feels like humans invented "entertainment" only in recent years. Were all previous generations of humans in a perpetual state of madness from the relentless boredom?

To answer the questions, what was most difficult for me was everything in the "lead guitar" world. Chords have always been easy for me. Playing single notes was something I didn't start to learn properly for many years. What I would do different if I could start again is I would have sought out proper lessons instead of being completely ignorant about everything. As for big breakthrough moments, the only one of those I had was when I suddenly went from not being able to play barre chords to being able to comfortably play barre chords for no reason. Like literally one minute I couldn't then the next minute I could.

 

[Kai C]

It was exhilarating, and I never cared about college again.

Famous words

 

[Rute Rodrigues]

Okay, so it was 1984 or 1985. It really is hard to remember, to be honest. I was a teenager just starting high school. I had a small record collection - not because it was cool or because neckbeards pretended they knew about sonic purity, but because they were the only logical choice, at least until I got a cassette walkman a year or so later, and then after that started to drive.

CDs were 3 or 4 years away for the commoner. We had a VCR in the house with a WIRED remote control. MTV played music videos, but we couldn't afford MTV, so there was "Friday Night Videos" on NBC and "Night Tracks" on TBS - basic cable. The videos weren't really good for seeing what someone was playing, because video editors really didn't pay attention to using shots that were of the performers miming the actual parts - they didn't care.

There would be no YouTube for several decades. There were tab books that were of varying quality from "horrible" to "tolerably useful." If you slowed a song down, the pitch changed. Drastically. Guitar For the Practicing Musician and Guitar World magazines were the only place for quality tabs, and they chose 3-4 songs a month to transcribe. Every couple months you'd get a magazine that had a song you wanted to learn that you also had a copy of on cassette or vinyl.

My mom and Dad rented me a Fender Mustang and a small Peavey combo amp (Bandit? I don't remember) so I could see if I liked playing and would stick to learning. I started taking lessons at that same music store, the only real place in town we knew of. He was a great player, but he was a jazz guy and all he wanted to teach me was Mary Had a Little Lamb. I mentioned bands I liked and he dismissed them as crap. After a few lessons, I quit, grabbing an Iron Maiden songbook on my way out the store. I think it was $27, and it fell in the "horrible" category.

Soon I bought an Aria Pro II explorer copy from a cousin i saw once or twice a year He was a drummer but had a guitar to sell for some reason (I later found out that reason was that he sold and did a lot of drugs, until he got caught and went to jail). Much later I bought a used Sunn tube amp from an ad in the local paper and some DOD pedals and a shitload of 9V batteries.

The Iron Maiden book was transcribed by someone who really didn't play guitar - they figured out the notes and transcribed all the tab as if it were played in the open position. After months of frustration trying to learn songs like Phantom of the Opera in open position, I tried changing the tabs to make it easier. That was when I realized how bad the tab was.

The first song I learned was Flight of Icarus. It would be a decade before I'd go back and learn it correctly, haha.

Transcriptions started getting better, as the competing magazines tried to beat each other out for accuracy. They started feeding those out to the songbook companies later so the tab books were better. There still weren't any instructional videos I was aware of, and there were so many insanely fast players. My young mind compared what I heard to what I could do and rationalized that there was NO WAY these people could POSSIBLY be playing exactly the same thing twice in a row.. They HAD to be just "winging it," so that's what I started doing. Instead of trying to learn some superfast solo note for note, I would just "play fast in this position" or "play fast from here to here."

I bought Doug Marks' "Metal Method" out of the back of a magazine. It was $30 and took almost 2 months to get to me. It was a bunch of warbly examples on a badly copied cassette and some photocopied sheets of paper stapled together. I was heartbroken. It didn't make real sense to me, either.

You found other people to jam with on the post-it board at the music store. I tried a couple and got to an audition for one, and jammed with a few guys. I didn't get the gig, but it was exhilarating. By this time, I was about to head off to college, though. I took my guitar and spent the last of my money on the first and only headphone amp in existence - a Tom Scholz Rockman. It had the most amazing clean tone ever (I even found someone who modeled it for the AxeFX and use it as my clean tone still today), but the distorted tone sucked. Anyway, I was practicing in my room with the door open and an upperclassman walked by. He came in and asked to listen to me play on the headphones, and then asked me to be in his band. We took second place in the school Battle of the Bands a few months later, playing Dokken's In My Dreams, Tesla's Comin Atcha Live and Whitesnake's Crying in the Rain.

It was exhilarating, and I never cared about college again.

Must be really shit want to learn a song and realise that the tabs are all wrong. That just makes me think about how easy it is now, when you find 20 different videos to the same song. That's interesting to have the perspective of other people who learned music before I actually exist.

I started learning 5 years ago when I was 11 so I know I don't count but, well, I'm in a train and have nothing to do so I'll write anyway.

So I started learning in a local music school when I was in 6th grade. When I was in 5th, we had music at school and we would learn flute. My parents saw my interest in music, also my music teacher told my parents that I should learn an instrument. So I went to the music school in my town.

All I can say is that was a good experience. First of all, I had an awesome teacher. They guy was a talented musician. I started with classical music, learning Bach and that type of things. He was always showing me new stuff to learn. In second place, and the best, is that I had interaction with other musicians. Drummers, pianists, singers etc. It was REALLY cool.

I'd leave school earlier everyday and I'd go to the school, I used to go to the studio where I had lessons and I'd be there till the night come. I used to jam with the guys that were there or just alone. Imagine: 7th grade me, finishing school around 5pm and go to the music school and seeing someone waiting for his/her lesson and say "Hey, let's go to the studio play together till your lesson!"

I fucking miss that studio. It was amazing! It had a lot of guitars, a drum set and keyboards. Fuck, I miss that days. Was my paradise.

Around 7/8pm I needed to be at home. I made a lot of good friends and memories that will be with me till I die. Specially a drummer. A guy that I still jam with and I really adore him. It was at this time that we started playing rock and metal. Nirvana, SOAD, Metallica and Maiden were our gods. So I switched to to electric guitar. THAT WAS THE TIME. (!!!) My world changed

So then I started learning rock. That drummer that I told became my best friend ever. We always had our lessons together. My lesson was from 4pm to 5 and his was from 5 to 6 so we always had our lessons together. We were learning the same songs. I remember every time our teacher leaved the room to go to the bathroom or so, we always started making noise, playing a bad version of Master of Puppets.

We performed All of Me live here it is:
Also Englishman in New York:
The bassist is a virtuoso guy. See the sax solo around 1:50

This one is by Anastacia. (The guy on drums was my teacher!!!))

Then the school closed and cried for one day long and shit. Then I discovered this school.
A few time ago, me and my friends from the school formed a band. A cover band. We would practice every Saturday. Here's a clip of Purple Rain. YOU NEED TO SEE THE 2nd VIDEO! SEE THE DRUMMER'S SOLO IN THE END PLS! Again, see why I love my friends. They are amazing. That's my best friend in the drums. The other guitarist is the bassist in Englishman in New York. He's 25. Here is his solo https://youtu.be/-n9NOzHHGRc

The singer is a good friend of mine and the bassist, well, I know that guy since we are 5


Sadly, the guitarist moved to other city and the singer went to uni. I still jam with the drummer.

 

[Kai C]

@Rute Rodrigues You guys are fucking awesome, you can see the hard work and love flowing in that music. What direction are you trying to go in? I think you guys would kill it in a jazz bar

 

[Dominik Gräber]

Must be really shit want to learn a song and realise that the tabs are all wrong. That just makes me think about how easy it is now, when you find 20 different videos to the same song. That's interesting to have the perspective of other people who learned music before I actually exist.

I started learning 5 years ago when I was 11 so I know I don't count but, well, I'm in a train and have nothing to do so I'll write anyway.

So I started learning in a local music school when I was in 6th grade. When I was in 5th, we had music at school and we would learn flute. My parents saw my interest in music, also my music teacher told my parents that I should learn an instrument. So I went to the music school in my town.

All I can say is that was a good experience. First of all, I had an awesome teacher. They guy was a talented musician. I started with classical music, learning Bach and that type of things. He was always showing me new stuff to learn. In second place, and the best, is that I had interaction with other musicians. Drummers, pianists, singers etc. It was REALLY cool.

I'd leave school earlier everyday and I'd go to the school, I used to go to the studio where I had lessons and I'd be there till the night come. I used to jam with the guys that were there or just alone. Imagine: 7th grade me, finishing school around 5pm and go to the music school and seeing someone waiting for his/her lesson and say "Hey, let's go to the studio play together till your lesson!"

I fucking miss that studio. It was amazing! It had a lot of guitars, a drum set and keyboards. Fuck, I miss that days. Was my paradise.

Around 7/8pm I needed to be at home. I made a lot of good friends and memories that will be with me till I die. Specially a drummer. A guy that I still jam with and I really adore him. It was at this time that we started playing rock and metal. Nirvana, SOAD, Metallica and Maiden were our gods. So I switched to to electric guitar. THAT WAS THE TIME. (!!!) My world changed

So then I started learning rock. That drummer that I told became my best friend ever. We always had our lessons together. My lesson was from 4pm to 5 and his was from 5 to 6 so we always had our lessons together. We were learning the same songs. I remember every time our teacher leaved the room to go to the bathroom or so, we always started making noise, playing a bad version of Master of Puppets.

We performed All of Me live here it is:
Also Englishman in New York:
The bassist is a virtuoso guy. See the sax solo around 1:50

This one is by Anastacia. (The guy on drums was my teacher!!!))

Then the school closed and cried for one day long and shit. Then I discovered this school.
A few time ago, me and my friends from the school formed a band. A cover band. We would practice every Saturday. Here's a clip of Purple Rain. YOU NEED TO SEE THE 2nd VIDEO! SEE THE DRUMMER'S SOLO IN THE END PLS! Again, see why I love my friends. They are amazing. That's my best friend in the drums. The other guitarist is the bassist in Englishman in New York. He's 25. Here is his solo https://youtu.be/-n9NOzHHGRc

The singer is a good friend of mine and the bassist, well, I know that guy since we are 5


Sadly, the guitarist moved to other city and the singer went to uni. I still jam with the drummer.

Wow, that was really awesome. Also great drum solo. Love your story, thanks for sharing it with us!

 

[Rute Rodrigues]

@Rute Rodrigues You guys are fucking awesome, you can see the hard work and love flowing in that music. What direction are you trying to go in? I think you guys would kill it in a jazz bar

Well thank you!!! Since the guitarist moved to other town and the singer is in uni, we don't have much time to play together, which is shit I know, but we have jam sessions sometimes. We're more like a classic rock band but we also play jazz and blues to jam. Thank you, means a lot!