Guitar Desire : An Introduction

And now it’s time for a new series, one that chronicles my involvement with electric guitars. No, not just in music but in wanting, owning, and possibly even playing one.

When I was a young teen I played keyboards. Hey, it was the eighties. There might have been magazines for keyboards but I didn’t know about them. What I knew about was Guitar Player magazine. I didn’t own a guitar and didn’t even really want to learn to play one… they were too complicated. No, I’d leave that up to Brad Owens, a friend of mine who could shred. Sorry, but I don’t remember what kind of guitar he had but I have a picture of it somewhere. It was white. But I would get the Guitar Player magazine each month and follow along with the music, following the lines of notes up and down as the featured guitarist did his thing.

Brad and I would sometimes drive to Music Manor, an independent music store (remember those?). He would lust over all the different guitars while I would look at the rack-mounted effects units and, if there was one around, the lone keyboard. All those things with strings sitting around the floor were ignored.

A couple of years later another friend, Roger, borrowed my brothers acoustic Yamaha guitar and learned it. Amazing! How do people learn these things!?!?! Keyboards make sense. The keys are lined up in a pattern and each one is a half tone higher than the next. Logical, eh? But the guitar… Insanity! I still had no desire to learn but once crucial thing happened: Roger suggested that I learn the bass guitar.

For a variety of reasons I didn’t take him up on the suggestion at the time. However in college another pal (hey, this makes it sound like I have friends! Unfortunately I do not. But that’s another series for another time) played a five string bass and once, at a live performance at the student center, he wanted to play the sax on a song and so handed me the bass. Wait… WHAT?!?!? He gave me a thirty second tutorial, turned down the high end on his amp, and very likely had me play open strings on some three-chord blues song. I have no idea of how well I played and really no way to judge. But between Paul’s lesson and Roger’s suggestion the idea was firmly planted. A year or so later I asked, and Paul allowed, me to borrow his bass to try it out some more. I had a bass sheet music book by one of my favorite bands, King’s X, and I wanted to try my hand at the songs. I don’t think it went well. And yes, I was in the habit of buying sheet music for instruments I didn’t play. I still have all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas plus a violin and piano set for Prokofiev’s first violin sonata. I just like following along, I guess.

Jump forward a few more years (1995ish) and I’m a young married guy in a very lonely marriage. I have no idea why but for some reason I had the urge to learn the bass guitar. As usual I just jumped right in without doing much research… kind of like the marriage. My purchase was a Yamaha four string natural finish bass from a pawn shop for $160. Someone has scratched, and then sloppily sanded off, something below the bridge. I didn’t even know how to tune the thing so I had to have someone come over who played guitar to show me. I was that green.

I learned to play, with “You Lord” by PFR being my first song. Again, I was so green I didn’t know that this was a pretty complicated song. Then I wrote “Lobster Boy” using every trick I knew: plucking, slides and hammer-ons. Within two months I was playing in the praise band at church and I learned that Roger’s advice has been very good. To this day, though I play other instruments, bass is where I feel the most at home, a place where in a group setting I have my voice.

Originally this series wasn’t going to include bass guitars but I see that they are insisting that they be included. How can I turn them down? Unfortunately I don’t think I have a picture of this bass and don’t even know the model number. Thinking about it, I don’t even remember what kind of pickups it had or even if it had one or two. So sad…

Note: It seems like I’ve touched on this subject once before in this here blog.