Music - Playing At Guitar

I've been playing "at" guitar for a "few" years now.

I say "at" rather than just "play" or even dare call myself a guitar "player", as that is the term that pros like Al Dimeola, Alex Lifeson, Jimmy Page, Jimmy Hendrix, Carolos Santana, Kim Mitchell, David Gilmore and Tony Iommi (to name a few of my favorites) use to refer what to what they do. What I do with a guitar is as far from what they do, as my golf game is as far from the PGA Tour pros' :) ... Well actually my golf game is a lot closer to a pro's game than my guitar playing is.

Ok, I'm hard on myself, and actually for some of the simple things I've done on guitar, I'm actually pretty proud of myself. They sound good ... to me anyway. I'm in tune (more or less) and on the beat ... I think my sense of rhythm and timing is pretty good ... not that it's something that I can take credit for developing. Must be part of my European ancestry :)

I started when I was about 10 years old with used electric gutar bought from my neighboour.

It took me seemingly "forever" to learn even the basic barre chords. The fingering was not all that difficult for the basic major and minor chords, but my left hand seemed to stubbornly want to exert tremendous tension and pressure while trying to hold the chord. Or maybe it was my brain thinking that all that tension was necessary. Or maybe just because it was a cheap guitar and the action on it wasn't very good :)

I have some of my "sound sketches" on SoundClick.

Not polished songs by any means, but they amuse me :)

Like many other endeavours, part of my frustration with learning guitar has been to try to do too much too soon, instead of learning and perfecting simpler "baby steps", but I'm slowly learning that lesson ... in a lot of areas in my life as I pass through middle age. (I hope it's the middle anway).

Mike