The Guitar Effect

Music is something magical. It has the power to change the world, can mark significant points in our lives, and bring us to new emotional place. I view music as not just something to listen to, but an experience. The greatest joy of music is creating and sharing it with the people I meet along my journey through life.

Learning to play the guitar has changed my life. This may seem like an exaggeration, but when I look back upon the period of life before I picked the guitar up, I was a different person. I suffered from a depression, had trouble in school, had difficulty making good friends, and any form authority repulsed me. I suffered from the typical teenage mentality, just developing independent thought and thinking that I knew everything, and if it weren't for those foolish adults, the world would be much better.

My dad played guitar for years, and I was always impressed with his ability. He'd gone to the Musicians Institute in L.A., and really knew his instrument. I had asked him to teach me several times, but he was always busy with work and trying to feed his 3 obnoxious children. I was the youngest of three, with two older sisters. Being youngest had its advantages, but it also meant that I was left behind by my two older siblings a lot. It also didn't help much that I was a boy, and most of their activites weren't all too boyish. My mother and father had been divorced since I can remember, and I didn't get to see my mom too often until I later moved with her at around 16. Ironically, it was my mother who actually got me started in playing guitar, completely unintentionally.

She bought an old Takamine acoustic guitar from a pawnshop, along with a few "learn to play guitar!" books for herself in December of 2004, as she'd always wanted to play, but never had taken it up. She tried playing a few times, but never really put much time into it. I asked my mom on New Years Eve if I could play her guitar, as the new years events were somewhat uninspiring to me. I sat down with her book, and began to follow some of the exercises in the book, and I don't think I went to sleep until the next morning after the sun had come up. From that point, that guitar didn't leave my hand, and I learned as much as I could however I could.

The book my mother bought wasn't much use after about a month, and no one in the small town in Arkansas that I lived in could teach me too much. I met a few people here and there who showed me a bit, but mostly I was on my own as far as my learning went. I learned to read tablature online, and began finding tabs to some of my favorite songs on the internet, as well as some scale patterns, and technique lessons, and practiced constantly. I saved up my money and took online courses, and I took my guitar with me everywhere. Luckily the town I was in was small enough that I could convince the principal of the school to let me bring my guitar so I could play it at lunch in exchange for not acting like an "uncontrollable punk"(I'll always remember that conversation with the principal) in my classes.

Over the next several months, my behavior changed pretty dramatically, I didn't really feel the need to act out as much, I did my homework, and my grandparents were thrilled to see my test scores and daily grades finally match for once in my life. Soon after I moved back with my dad because the school I was going to got closed down, as it was too small for the state to support. I still had two years of high school left, but I finished them with one year of home schooling.

That year, I got my first electric guitar. I was immediately was enthralled with it, and played it constantly. I loved to sit next to the amp I'd gotten for it, and turn on the clean sound, and just play; cranking up the distortion and disturbing the sleep of my neighbors also held a special place in my heart. After a hard day, I'd come home and vent it out with some heavy distortion and fast picking, and if the day were great, I'd celebrate with a nice clean funky sound. My guitar was my mood ring, and soon my family knew just how I was feeling by my playing. On extraordinarily good or bad days, the neighborhood I lived in might also have gotten an inkling of my emotional state.

That year, I also met my first love while playing guitar at a friend's house. We spent some of the happiest times of my life together, and she was the only thing that could take the guitar out of my hands. We started dating that summer, and spent the next year together nearly every moment of every day, but life happens, and the next year she moved away to college, and I stayed at the local college. We stayed together for another year and a half, but our lives were just headed in different directions, so we split up. The time away from her was spent either working or learning a new scale pattern or song, and the ultimate breakup was surmounted by hours of just playing the guitar.

It never ceases to amaze me when I stop to think about it just how much a bunch of metal and wood has changed my life and influenced me. On days that I felt like there was no one who could possibly understand what was going on, my guitar was there to "talk" for me, and on days where I couldn't possibly have felt any better, it sang out like a chorus of birds on a winter morning, jubilant to have made it through another freezing night. Still to this day, there is no relationship anywhere that can quite relate to the way I feel about the music I make.

I suppose I'll just wrap things up by saying that if anyone reading this is on the fence about whether or not to take the leap and learn any instrument, guitar or otherwise, do it. The worst that could possibly happen is you find out later it isn't really what you wanted, and you're out a bit of money. More money can be made. The longer you wait to learn to play anything, the less of your life you'll have filled with the joy and love that only playing an instrument can bring, and I didn't even talk about the absolute charge obtained only by making music with other people. Go for it, dive in, and get ready to swim, and prepare to look at life a little differently.