Git-tar Hero

I bumped into my guitar instructor today, she asked me how I was as well as my playing progress. Before I could reply, she suggested that we talk over dinner; which I agreed since myself had been 'running dry' of dates lately.

It's been a while since I did any flashback posts, well today I've decided to reminisce about how I started picking up the guitar.

It all started when I went to my buddy's Vincent's house, I think I was in Secondary One then. He had a guitar in his house and used to play in his church gatherings, which I sometimes attended. The more I saw him play, the more I wanted to learn. There were a lot of benefits, it was a cool living skill, and it impresses girls; actually I was in it for the girls part, lol.

By the time I decided to really commit myself to learning, we were in our college days, and Vincent went to KL to further his studies. So I decided to pick up the guitar by myself, and bought my first 'Kapok' guitar. It was blue in color, and my brother use to chastise me for choosing such an ugly color. I printed chords from the Internet, and even went to an old bookstore to look for the infamous '50-cent chord book'.

I taught myself how to read tabs, and began playing a few simple songs on my own. Later I played with a few of my self-taught friends, we gave tips and pointers to each other while improving our picking/strumming technique. That time we didn't know anything about beats or tempo, we just listened closely to how the song was played and mimicked it. It was all great fun.

Now, my mother attended music school when she was young, she plays the organ; I forgot what grade she was. One day when she heard me play at home she told me, "Your upbeat and downbeat are not parallel, you got the tempo all wrong." I was baffled of course, I've never heard of tempos and beats before. She suggested that I should attend a proper guitar lesson, to help me understand better my playing. I thought I was already good then, but Mother had her way, and I reluctantly went.

On my first day of class I was introduced to Danielle, my guitar instructor. She was pretty, she couldn't have been much older than I was, and had a cute smile to match. It made me a little less reluctant after that. She taught me that a 'beat' was actually a basic time unit of a piece of music; and there were 1/2 beats, 1/4 beats, etc. I was introduced to tempos then, and she advised me to get a metronome, which is a must to help to fine-tune my rhythm. I spent 2 months learning new things, and even got myself my current Yamaha F-210 acoustic.

just waiting for me like a secret friend~

I went on to escalate myself this time in rock music, and met some new friends at the jamming studio. We formed a band called 'days of adolescence', and played a great number of rock songs with the studio owner as our vocalist. Our one time favorite was GN'R's "Sweet child O' Mine", I was good with the riffs and I swear that our vocalist sounds 99% like Axel. We got away with the surcharge fees most of the time, as we used to pretend that we 'forgot the time' while playing.

All that has changed by now, as my former band mates and I are occupied with job responsibilities, and we're residing in different states as well. And I haven't seen Danielle ever since I left music school, which has been 2 years already. She was still the wild and carefree girl I once knew, and she told me a lot about herself over dinner. I was surprised to find out that the organ was the first instrument she learned, before picking up the guitar. When I asked her who was her instructor, she replied, "Oh, my instructor? It was your mother. She was the one who told me you were enrolling and told me to be your teacher."