Head Tale

I bought my first guitar after coming back from a University exchange to England in 1995.  It cost me $60 and I still have it.  It’s an El Degas model which is Spanish for “cheap crap”. 🙂

(Wow, Google tells me these guitars were actually made in Japan and mostly exported to Canada in the 1970’s and 80’s and make an excellent beginner guitar – who knew?)

While on that exchange, I lived in dorms where I ended up forming a “folk/punk” group with a group of American exchange students.  Most bands have names but we changed our name every time we got together to jam so that was part of the joke.

One of the guys in our band would borrow a guitar from any British student who had one (and was brave enough to lend us one), I’d play “drums” on an upside down bucket, one person had a Dollar Store recorder and one person, uhm, I think she also played a bucket come to think of it.

We’d go to a nearby Spar (a British Dutch version of 7-11) and buy a few bottles of the cheapest wine we could find (I think it was called “Rochelle”) then consume that and anything else we could get our hands on while trying to write the funniest/stupidest songs we could.  For example, the first half-dozen songs we wrote all had the word “Whitey” somewhere in the title.  “Whitey” was British slang for passing out so that gives you some insight into our band’s philosophy.

Anyhow, there are a lot of stories I could tell about that band (uhm, come to think of it, probably not) but getting back to my own guitar history, when I got back to Canada, I realised that if we could write songs when our main guitar player knew basically two chords, it couldn’t be that hard.

I found the El Degas, likely on some primitive online bulletin board system and began teaching myself how to play using tutorials, chord charts and tabulature I found online (all text files since this is pre-YouTube) as well as books and videos from the Regina Public Library (yay!)

Soon, I learned enough chords to play along with most basic songs if I had the chord chart and since then, have always played for my own enjoyment and entertainment but never dedicated myself to the guitar in any sustained or systematic fashion. (When asked if I play, I always joke that “own a guitar” but I don’t really know how to play.)

I’ve had that first guitar since around 1996 (supplemented by a cheap used electric Fender Squire I picked up, also while in University and just a couple years ago, another acoustic I found at a garage sale for about $40 so I now have an “upstairs” and a “downstairs” guitar – lucky or lazy, you decide!)

Anyhow, I came across the video below tonight and it made me think how much different my guitar playing experience might have been if I was as dedicated (obsessed?) as this young man who, as many of the YouTube comments point out, seems as good after 30 hours of practice as people who’ve been playing for years.

His progress is amazing but then again, has he written songs called “Whitey, You Suck”, “Who’s That Whitey?” or “Whitey #9”?  I don’t think so! 🙂