The back ground to this story starts some time ago… [some time around 1990…after ‘Appetite for Destruction’ and before ‘Use Your Illusion’] where I used to attempt to join in with my good friend in playing the guitar, not having a guitar of my own I used to borrow my friends second guitar (Rockwood Hohner – Les Paul copy) this way of self teaching got me about 3 single string licks of a couple of Metallica intros!
Long story short, my brother ended up buying the Hohner off my friend some years later, which i then stole/borrowed and still have some years after that!
So, now I have a guitar! I attempt to self teach for about 4 years…. learning essentially nothing apart from a couple of Red hot Chilli Peppers solos…. until I get some lesson Vouchers one Christmas (2007) from Jayne (The Mrs).
I then had my lessons each week for 10 weeks and learnt more in the first weeks than I had learnt in the last 20ish years! My teacher was Andy from the local band ‘Dazed and Confused’ which I will be going back to as soon as I have a spare night in the week (hopefully this spring) But for now its home learning as and when I can, grab 15 minutes here and there.
The lessons were good and it was fun learning from Andy as he loved all the tracks I wanted to try and play. Before my first lesson, he just told me to bring a stack of CDs that I like and would like to play. That was all I needed to trawl through hundreds of 80/90’s rock tracks to pick out all the classics that I’d love to learn!
The lessons in addition to a lot of personal reading has got me up and running and actually playing tracks! The foundations are now in place, its just a case of continuous learning and, hopefully, improvement 🙂