Despite that fact, since its my first posting, I'm going to explain who I am to start. In future posts, I will be writing about my influences as an artist, songs I may be working on, other musicians I have performed with, and probably, time to time, a rant about something going on in the world. I'm good like that.
My name is Tony, and I have been playing guitar for about 14 years. My first guitar was a Crestwood brand acoustic guitar that my dad bought for me in the fall of 1995. I really didn't pluck on it much for the first six months. The first songs I learned were "Yankee Doodle" and "Love Me Tender", just the verse notes in the first position. I really had no clue where to go or how I would ever be any good.
I remember distinctly that Christmas that a family friend had picked up my acoustic and played some chords, and I was just awestruck that my guitar could sound like that. But yet, it still sat in the corner.
One night during a power outage during the summer of 1996, I was goofing around with the guitar in this little cove in our house where the guitar sounded really loud and awesome. And I just started reefing on one string and I found out that I could bend it. If there was a defining moment in my guitardom, that was the moment.
Within a couple months I was grasping chords, and by that Christmas, I was almost at the level that the family friend had been. In just a short year!
The first album I got a book for was Eric Clapton's "Unplugged". The first songs I printed off the internet were long drawn out tabs of The Eagles' "Hotel California", Stevie Ray Vaughan's "Texas Flood", and The Beatles "Strawberry Fields Forever". Quite an ambitious sonofabitch, wasn't I?
I still haven't been able to play any of those three songs.
But I received a book in the summer of 1998 that was a Beatles 'cheater' song book, that had chords to about 100 of their songs. And I was playing those songs like crazy, singing softly to myself in my room, sometimes on the porch out front, but that was it.
But I was learning. Learning how to sing along with my playing. A huge step forward.
