So you want to play the guitar... (I wish someone had told me a story like this)

There was a Glen Campbell song, called ‘Me and My Guitar.’  But me and my guitar? Yeah, well, we don’t always get along.  That’s what happens when you get down to learning something.  It can get horrible, moving beyond the basics, the safe, the comfortable.

It’s the same with anything.  Learn to work with wood, and you get to a stage where you try to get it to do something it can’t quite manage, at least not the way you’re trying to do it.  Learn to drive a race-car, and you get to a stage where you think you’re competent, accomplished.  You can want to stay there, safe, looking cool, and assured, but you have to move on, and then it can look ugly, and you can look like a rank beginner, all over again.  Whatever you try, you’ll reach that point where you feel comfortable, and you’ll want to stay there, where people can see you are competent.  Complacency is appealing, seductive.

Things can get ugly between my guitar and I.  There are times when we sail along smoothly, a unit, meshing together, doing things we’re comfortable with.  Then it can turn into a chaotic wrestling match, an ugly street brawl, messy.  This is the way it has to be, if we are to explore new ground.  The guitar complains, and the wrestling starts.  I try to gently convince it that we need to stretch, move, grow.  The guitar kicks up, what was going smoothly, starts to slow down.  The harmonious song starts to squeak, grind and chatter—the guitar sounds decidedly unhappy.  I feel sorry, ashamed, it’s the pain we have to go through—buzz, thunk, plunk, or silence where there should be sound.

I bought my first guitar when I was 17.  Let’s face it, when you’re in your teens and you want an electric guitar, you’ve likely only got one thing in mind—you’re going to be a rock star!

It took some time to summon up the courage to walk into the music store and lay down the money to buy the guitar.  I watched the balance in my bank book grow, and one lunch time I walked down to the store, bought the guitar, and had the guy hold it for me, for when I got off work.

I had no idea what I was in for.

I sat on my bed, a book on guitar playing open on the bed, and eagerness just oozing out of me.  I placed a finger ever so deliberately on a string, and played a note, and then nothing… at least until I found the next note to play.  It was a struggle.

A few weeks later I bought a book that was about rhythm guitar.  I got all set up to play my first chord, an ‘E’ major and strummed, ‘plunk!’  I pressed harder, got a few clear sounds, and some buzzes and then dull pain.  After ten or twenty minutes, I was no closer to sounding like anyone, and I was very frustrated.  Day after day the same thing happened, and then I moved back to the book about lead guitar.  Look at the finger on my left hand—make sure it’s on the correct string, pluck the string with the plectrum, look at the plectrum and make sure I pluck the correct string this time.

The guitar was electric, and thankfully I had nothing to plug it into, so no one else had to suffer the mess I was making.

Music playing and I already had a bone of contention between us—it was called the recorder.

The recorder is a plastic whistle that we were introduced to in year four.  I can remember standing up the back of the classroom, behind everyone else, pretending to play, because I couldn’t get the blowing and the fingering synchronised.  I had the advantage of being half a head shorter than everyone else—the teacher couldn’t see me, as she played her piano, so she never knew.  Oh I managed to play “Mary had a Little Lamb” perfectly, but anything faster was impossible.

The recorder was boring, annoying, and clumsy—your thumb covers a hole at the back, and uncovers it halfway to make sharps and flats.  It is messy.

The guitar doesn’t suffer from that messiness, no little tricks to make flats or sharps.  It is flexible, changing tuning changes the configuration, it’s like being able to move the keys on a piano.  Your voice is free to sing, because it’s not a wind instrument.  To silence the strings for musical rests, you use your hand, not your feet like the piano, it’s less complicated.  And it’s portable, you can put it in the seat of a car, or carry it on the back of a motorbike. When you get it wrong, and learning how to play any musical instrument means getting it wrong, it's not as annoying as a violin, or as loud as a trumpet.

I spent months making awful noises, with tunes that were only recognisable to me.  I had no doubt I could learn the guitar, which is something, because I was so far away from what could be considered even showing promise.

When I was growing up, I took a stab at learning how to play Aussie rules footy.  To be quite honest, I was never going to be a great player, but my Dad, always full of encouragement, would say, many times, “Don’t worry if you don’t get it, you’ll be out the back, practising, and it’ll just come to you, in an instant.”  No one would catch me out the back practising footy, but years later, that’s exactly what happened when it came to playing the guitar.  The power of mental rehearsal.  The phrase “sleep on it” does mean something.  I spent months trying to get the basics right, and hardly improving.  It is something we don’t need anyone to remind us of.  I would try to get a chord correct, clear… and fail, and fail again, for minutes, then I would get to the stage that I was frustrated, almost wanting to throw the guitar away.  Then one day, it was a little easier.

That was just the start.  So I could strum an ‘A’, or an ‘E’, which was fine as long as there was a song that consisted of one chord.  Or The Who’s “My Generation”, which is close enough.  I had to get the hang of changing chords.  It was labourious, and it took months.  I had to fight complacency and plain laziness all the way.  ‘Plunk’… pain… move fingers a little… perfect… change chords… ‘plunk’, again.  I played guitar with friends, every now and then, with them all telling me I had to get around to changing chords.

It seems as if I woke up one day, grabbed the guitar, and suddenly I wasn’t sounding too bad.  I had held off getting any lessons, under the pretentious reasoning that I wanted to develop my own style, first.  So exactly what style was I going for, 6 year old plunking style?  Time lead me to getting lessons, eventually, at a store in West Perth, across the road from a Scout shop.  They allowed me to concentrate on getting my technique correct.  Very early on, my teacher took a look at the guitar I had bought, and advised me to buy a new one.  It was embarrassing to find a guitar only five dollars more than the first one I bought, streets ahead in quality.  Nice, light solid body, and a rosewood fingerboard, with an action (the distance between the strings and the fretboard, the smaller the better) that was good.  I still own that guitar.

Then, for a little while, I was in a band.  We were happy with what we were doing, some original songs, and some covers, but it threw up things I didn’t expect.  The bass player was better than me, but then he had a better attitude, at the time, towards learning new things.  My ego found that hard to take, that and I really started to dislike the way he dressed like Robert Smith, of The Cure.  I was never interested in trying to sound like someone else.  As a band even the covers we did didn’t sound like the originals.  We did Yazoo’s “Only You,” a pop-synth hit of the 80s, but our line up consisted of a female singer, a bass player, a drummer, and two guitarists.  See what I mean, we were not going to sound like anyone else.  We did one public performance, before I ran into my own personal mess.

I was dealing with all the baggage I had from the death of a friend, Steve, my feelings for his girlfriend, Leonie, and being almost unemployable.  Music might have been a nice escape, and ideas of stardom were a handy distraction.  But it wasn’t worth going crazy over.  It was a mess, and while I knew exactly what I was doing with music, I had no idea what I was doing with the rest of my life.  I left the band, and went through a sort of personal rebuilding.

That was some 20 years ago...

A few weeks ago, I picked up my acoustic guitar, again, and went right back to basics.  Now I can read and play the notes from Middle 'c', 'g' through to 'g', all down the end of the fingerboard.  I messed around with "Black Magic Woman" to where it isn't boring, and I've been tackling some of Springsteen's easier songs from Nebraska, including the title track.

I still can’t give you a sense of what music does to me.  A few days ago I listened to Bruce Springsteen’s second album, “The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle” and it just felt nice, I hadn’t heard it for a while.  When I hear the opening of Sherbet’s “Silv’ry Moon” it’s always like the second time I heard it, like the relief of a long sigh.

Practising the guitar is not a chore, consequently, while it is difficult, it isn’t an effort to pick up the guitar and try to get it right.  I have a picture in my head, sitting with the guitar writing songs, and playing around with chords and notes.  The real difficulty I have is getting the music in my head out onto paper, which is why, now, I’ve been working on reading and understanding music.  But the term “Rock Star”, well it’s fine for teenagers, but that ship sailed.  I enjoy the guitar, now, even if it does complain a little, every now and then, we have to grow together… it just has to be that way…