My Guitar Journey (so far)

I'm on threads a fair bit these days and I see a lot of people talk about guitar or learning to play guitar and I figured I'd drop my own guitar path down in case it helped anyone.  I didn't learn particularly fast or easily but maybe that can help also.

Once upon a time in the late 90s, my best friend and roommate took off in the middle of the night to move to New York.  We'd been trying to make a game together unsuccessfully for something like a year and I think he just got fed up.  We hadn't been making much progress.  Anyway I was stuck with the lease and in exchange for leaving me in that rough situation he left a bunch of stuff for me, including an old Peavy Amp.  

Some months go by and I decided to learn how to play guitar.  I thought it would be fun and cool, so I bought a book and video that professed to teach how to play guitar, and I bought a cheap electric guitar to plug into the amp.

Right away the first thing I need to do is a C Chord.  The video guy shows me how to do it, and I go to try it and it's a weird stretch but I kind of have it and I can kind of make it sound out.  Then they tell me they want me to play another chord.  I can't remember what it was but it definitely wasn't A Minor or E.  And this transition is impossible.  Like I physically just can't do it.  I put the guitar down and never pick it up again.

Years go by, Guitar Hero comes out, I learn to separate my hands by "strumming" with my right and "fretting" with my left.  It's not a real guitar but some of these skills are new and it's pretty fun.  Rock band comes out and I try my hand at drums.  I don't know how many people remember this but Rock Band ended up going pretty far.  They released a keyboard peripheral and two "pro guitar" controllers.  One was a toy guitar with fifty-some buttons, which I still have.  The other was a Fender Squier Stratocaster with a MIDI controller where one of the pickups should be.

This guitar can be plugged into Rock band and you can play "pro guitar" along with the songs.  This... was terrible.  Extremely hard, and I couldn't hear what I was doing wrong.  Just a generic "twang" sound.  Eventually I gave up on this, too.

I am still interested in guitar and at some point, I tell my wife that I really want a guitar for a gift.  She asks around her office and buys me a Takamine G series guitar.  I take it into a guitar shop to set up, and my stepmother buys me some guitar lessons.  I meet with an older fellow who always drinks a coke and smokes cigarettes.  His hands shake a little when he smokes but they're steady on his guitar.  he shows me how to hold it, how to strum it, and how to play my first few chords.  He also has songs that only use two chords that are easy to go between, and.. what do you know, I'm really playing!

Then something new came out.  Rocksmith.  You plugged an actual guitar cable into your guitar and the other end could plug into an X box 360. With my newfound knowledge, I take my Rock Band Fender Squier and plug it into my Xbox 360.  It tunes it up for me, and I start trying to play songs, and.. what do you know?  I can correct my mistakes, and even better, I'm actually playing the thing!

It turns out, this is a pretty good tool for practice.  The stuff my guitar teacher gives me, I play slowly, picking it out, the stuff I'm playing in rocksmith, I'm making a bunch of mistakes but I'm doing it full speed.  So I'm getting better at bluffing my way through mistakes.

Due to several factors I end up quitting my guitar lessons, but I still play Rocksmith pretty regularly for a while.  But eventually my interest in it fades a bit. 

And.. stays faded, for... years.  Until at some point I decide to find some new music.  I decide all the music I listen to is too sad. I had a spotify playlist called "Laying in bed and feeling feelings" which is pretty great, but super sad. I decide to try Power Metal because I somewhat liked Through the Fire and Flames by Dragonforce.  This leads me to a Japanes Power Metal band called Aldious, which reminds me of a band I'd seen once called Band Maid.  I decide to check them out (thinking they were metal, like Aldious or Babymetal).  Surprisingly.. their music was good.  Like.  Really good.  Like the best rock and roll I'd heard in a while good.

Eventually the best rock and roll I'd heard ever good.

And listening to them rock a bunch of power chords and play cool solos made me think about making those sounds myself.

I dug out my guitars, I plugged in my rocksmith cable and I started playing again.  I bought the PC version of Rocksmith so I could download community created versions of BAND-MAID songs.  And I absolutely hit a wall.

I just couldn't get any better.  Plus at some point I realized I was just getting better at Rocksmith, not actually at playing guitar.  Like it had turned into an ultra-hard version of Guitar Hero, it wasn't really playing the instrument.  But BAND-MAID had inspired me to get a new amp and a new PRS Custom 24.  I wanted to get better.  I looked up a few things online, I got a book on learning guitar.

The book talked about the pentatonic scale, and wanted me to memorize all the pentatonic scale shapes like.. before I did anything.

I tried for a while, and I got the kind of "standard" CAGED E shape down pretty well, but I started to get discouraged and felt a little lost.

On Threads someone was asking if anyone wanted guitar lessons and I, on a total whim, answered.  He offered my my first lesson for free, so I took him up on it.  Right away he asked what my goal for guitar was.  Unwilling to explain that I was trying to get better at Rocksmith, I told him I wanted to be able to make my own sounds, express myself with the instrument.  

Over the next four months or so there was a series of breakthroughs.  I could already play chords decently well from Rocksmith.  So I could do chord transitions with no problem so we focused on lead playing.  I mastered the pentatonic shapes.  I had excersizes to improve my finger dexterity and to help me know where the strings were, and eventually we unlocked the uiltimate ability.  Playing to backing tracks.  

Finding which key a backing track was in and playing the pentatonic scale against it was like crack cocaine.  I didn't want to do anything else.  I wasn't good at it.  My timing was off (honestly still is), I didn't know which notes to play when.  I'm sure it sounded like mindless noodling, but I was CLEARLY GETTING THERE.  I could make sounds that made sense with what I was hearing, and sometimes, a small melody or riff would come out.  And my teacher helped with this process too, listening to me, giving me constructive criticism and pointers, teaching me his own solo so I had a better idea of how a solo should be structured.

Eventually my teacher quit teaching guitar (or I'd have mentioned his name, he was fantastic).  But he gave me the tools I needed to carry on myself and now with that plus youtube tutorials I'm unlocking the rest of the things I need.  

Anyway, that was my journey, If you got this far I hope it was interesting!  If you had a similar or totally different journey I'd love to read about it in the comments or on Threads!  I'm @pinotorious there.  

Checking back in on Japanese Music, 2 years later

So it's been a couple years since I've updated and in that time I dived deep into the rabbit hole of Japanese Music. BAND-MAID was my gateway drug and I've only become more impressed by these women as I've listened to them more and learned more about them. There is abundant information out there about the members and how they've arrived where they are, so I won't go into that too much. Suffice it to say that I have a guitar teacher and an extra two guitars due entirely to Kanami Tono and her incredible ability to create riffs. The most inspiring guitarist I've ever heard. I'm not going to say anything about her technical skill aside from it's something more than I honestly ever aspire to reach, but she also makes songs that I could one day play and I honestly think she's a genius. Maybe the greatest rock songwriter since the 90s. Everything BAND-MAID has released I honestly like. I don't love every song but there's nothing I really dislike. BAND-MAID is the only band I can say that about. They've raised the bar so high that when I hear another band and they have a song I don't like I'm way more disappointed than I probably should be. So BAND-MAID still reigns supreme as my favorite band. A band that rose from the ashes this year to become a powerhouse is HAGANE. I'd heard Hagane before, but three out of five members left, and it seemed the band was over. I liked their music but I wouldn't have rated it that hightly. This year's Top of the Tower absolutely blew me away. It's probably my favorite metal album of all time, and if it weren't for Epic Narratives it'd be my album of the year, and honestly it gives Epic Narratives (BAND-MAID) a run for its money. Sakura is Hagane's guitarist and main songwriter and she is also quite skilled at creating catchy riffs, and with the new Hagane lineup, she's paired with Junna, a youtube sensation and incredible powerhouse of drumming energy and together they're unstoppable. Add in a dependable bassist and a fantastic singer they found seemingly out of nowhere and you have the biggest surprise for me since I discovered BAND-MAID. They've risen to the top and become my favorite metal band. NEMOPHIA, my former favorites, released an album this year also. While I liked it, I didn't like all of it, and I'm slightly afraid they've lost a step without their guitar virtuoso SAKI. Their current guitarist Hazuki is honestly great, and extremely skilled, but I'm just not sure if the band is the same. They did an amazing 4 hour concert this year where they played all of the music they've ever released, and while it was an impressive feat, it definitely didn't sound good the entire time. All of that said, NEMOPHILA is still an absolutely fantastic band. Their new album has some really great songs. G.O.D. and Beautiful Days are absoltutely incredible, and Mayu has shown herself to be quite a solid songwriter as well as a rhythm guitarist, and she still has some of the most unique and wonderful vocals I've ever heard, both her clean and harsh vocals are appealing to me. The last band I'll talk about at length (this time) is MUTANT MONSTER. Unfortunately they stopped releasing new music a while ago, though they did go on tour this year so maybe there's hope? They're just an absolutely incredible punk band with a long discography of absolutely great songs. They sound like they should be in the indie rock scene from the late 80s/early 90s, though maybe they're a bit more skilled at playing their instruments than those bands were. It's an incredible trio with a guitarist and bassist who both sing and have great voices that work well together. At times they're both playing and singing harmonies and it's honestly very impressive, even if the guitar and bass parts are pretty simple. MUTANT MONSTER is my saddest entry here because they're honestly one of my favorite bands and they have fewer than 5000 youtube subscribers. So that's four great bands that I've fallen in love with. Crazy thing? Here's a list of bands I could talk about but won't because I'm running out of time. Maybe future updates if I think about it: TRIDENT LOVEBITES LAURELS SAWAGI BRATS BRIDEAR MARY'S BLOOD ALDIOUS STEROPONY NEK! EAST OF EDEN GACHARIC SPIN DOLL$BOX TELECIDE And these are just ones with multiple songs that I really like, there are actually quite a few more! So lucky to have fallen into this Japanese music rabbit hole!