My Sophomore year of High School there was this girl from another school that I had a crush on. We were talking about music and what instruments we wished we could play. She mentioned she loved guitars. Well, I, being an idiot teenage boy came up with a fool-proof plan. "Y'know what? I'm gonna learn guitar. It'll be easy." What could possibly go wrong? You get a guitar, you learn the notes and you play it. Child's play, right? Wrong. I was terrible. I hit wrong strings and notes, I muted strings; every thing you could think someone could do wrong I did.
Needless to say the thing with that girl did not work out. It wasn't because of my guitar playing, but that's another story. I put my guitar down for a while. I didn't think I was any good and didn't have the faith in myself to get better. I just figured I could never be good at it. After some time and thinking I decided that all I needed to do was practice. It was mostly because of a single guy on youtube. His name is Eric Calderone, and the name of his channel is 331erock. I watched one of his videos and was hooked. He inspired me to be the player I am today. Of course, I'm still not at his level. That will take quite some time.
That was a huge step for me, though. Realizing that I could play that instrument and rock it has made me so much happier. When I'm having a bad day, I just go home, plug in, turn up the volume and distortion and just rock out. Being able to take an object into your hands and make music is one of the best things in the world to me, but I never would have been able to do it without working for it. My fingers are callused, and I'm getting even more blisters on them. It's all worth the pain though. Playing until my fingers bleed doesn't seem bad at all when I think about good I can get after it's all over.
Here's a video of one of Eric Calderone's videos. I think it's pretty obvious why I wish I could play like him.
Cool story, Drew. Can't believe you didn't get the girl in the end, but it wasn't really about that anyway, was it?
ReplyDeleteWhen I met the Mr. he offered me guitar lessons. It was his pick-up line actually. Needless to say, I only learned two or three cords (the rest it history as they say).
What I like about your blog Drew is you're doing that thing you said it was so hard for you to do. You're talking about your feelings, stuff you care about, stuff you're proud of, stuff you're working on. Keep it up Drew and you just might impress yourself.