When did you know you wanted to play guitar?

[Huggy Love]

1980, it was my seeing guys buy guitars and do crappy jobs of covers, and me saying to myself "Sheeet, I could do better than that". So I did the same, bought a guitar and did crappy versions of covers. .......... till I started doing my own originals, then people couldn't tell if I was screwing up or not.

I actually had a cheap plywood SG copy back in the mid 70's and learned Evil Ways, Love Roller Coaster, and Stairway to Heaven, but that doesn't count. I couldn't do any leads cause the action was so high from the cheap warped neck that I would have split my finger in half trying to bend a note. It wasn't until I got a decent guitar in 1980 that I could tackle AC/DC & Ozzy and play some mindless hammer-ons.

 

[Rider1260]

Thinking it was about 1973 started playing Bass but guitar was more fun we were all learning "Smoke on the Water"
Played Violin in grade school guitar took over at 12 ish

 

[Boudica]

I can’t say the exact moment, but I was always musical and loved to sing. I remember always liking guitars and thought they were cool. When I was 8, My mom bought me a cheap acoustic from sears or Montgomery wards, it might have been a Kay. She then took me to lessons for a year, but had to quit because we couldn’t afford them. I remember how sore my tiny 8 year old fingers were at first from fretting that cheap finger shredder. I kept playing on my own by ear, and learning out of my little Mel bay book my teacher had started me on. A friends older brother taught me smoke on the water and I thought I was really hot stuff. A few years later I discovered jimmy page and zep and then heart. I wanted to be Nancy Wilson. She was bad ass. I figured out several heart tunes. When I realized I was never gonna be the next jimmy page I got discouraged and put it down for 20 years or so. Recently, at the ripe age of 52, the itch came back and I picked it back up again. Had always wanted an electric because I just love that dirty, nasty, gritty growl of a howling guitar. I started taking lessons again about a year and a half ago. I am obsessed and practice about 3 hrs a day. My first electric was a prs es custom 22 that I traded in on a 2013 pauls guitar after a year or so. When I am playing I feel like I am finally being my authentic true self. Don’t know if that makes any sense, but that’s what it feels like. Am currently looking for someone else to play with but it’s kind of difficult for a young at heart 54 year old female to find anyone, but I won’t give up. And oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention I have a severe prs addiction and severe gas.

 

[Alan Manning]

Originally early 70s. Air guitar to mick Ronsons solo on Moonage Daydream.LOL.
about 78 saw Peter Frampton on the Comes Alive tour with a friend who was quite an accomplished player
bought myself a black beauty copy found basic chords came quite easily and that was it.
Been knocking out Show me the way ever since. Good Album that.!!!

 

[gag halfrunt]

The first time Eruption hit the airwaves...

 

[Boogie]

The first time Eruption hit the airwaves...

That’s what made me start playing. My ‘79 Les Paul just happens to be a year older than VH1.

 

[RaySachs]

When I was a tiny little kid, my teenage sister had a party and I remember sitting there in my pajamas while one of her friends held everyone’s rapt attention sitting by the fireplace playing an acoustic guitar and singing folk songs. I doubt I was more than 3 or 4 years old (she was 14 the year I was born, so she’d have been off to college by the time I was 5 or 6). I’ll never forget how cool I thought that guitar playing was - I’m sure it was just open chord strumming, but I was enthralled. Loved it and wanted to play from that point forward. My folks tried to get me lessons with a rental guitar when I was about eight, but the teacher kept trying to get me to play “Mary Had A Little Lamb” instead of “Satisfaction” or “Purple Haze” and it just didn’t take. I finally started teaching myself on a $60 pawn shop acoustic when I was 18 - that time it took...

 

[Parralax view]

My interest came hard earned, as the kid of an old world gentleman that happened be a great jazz guitar player, it wasn't asked, it was expected. I was the proverbial kid at the piano while his friends play ball in the front yard. I was 8, so there wasn't a NO to be said. But our musical interests diverged when I was around 13. I wanted to rock, he didn't, and didn't really know how. Enter my cousin Albert Gomez, also known as Big Man, cause he was around 375 or so and an es-335 looked like an ukulele on him. But he fronted a local Dallas band called "Big Man and the Night People", who were really the Pharaoh's when Sam wasn't booking gigs. Samuel Samudio, or Sam the Sham is some distant cousin of mine and his mom was my mom's cousin. I've never even met him... Anyway, my dad took me to Albert's little house in West Dallas and it was the first time I smelled tolex and tubes and lacquer.. I was intoxicated. He taught me some R&B, some Blues, and stuff that was popular in the late 50's. By the time I had heard Albert and some of the Pharaoh's jamming it was time.. for a band.

And then, above guitars and amps and Pharoah's came girls.....That was almost 6 decades ago. By the time I was 15 or so, I was proficient on guitar enough to sing and play with a band and that went on until around 2000 when I put bands away. Most all of my family then and now are and were players of instruments of one sort or the other. Mom was the church organist and pianist, read music, and while not a style I wished to follow, was really great at it. My dad as I said was a jazz player and I learned lots of finger stretchers at a very early age, and still retain some of them.