Diary: Guitar for Dummies

Recapturing those rock-n-roll years ..

My first stringed instrument was an old family mandolin, which I was given as a young teen. I would try to play the blues in my bedroom with John Peel on the radio. Later I saved up for a stylish acoustic guitar with pickup, which I could plug into the back of the valve radio (the 'ext mic.' socket). How my parents thrilled to Eric Clapton's solo from "Sunshine of Your Love" screaming through their house.

I wanted to be a lead guitarist, and at Warwick in my first term I acquired a strat from another student who was just terminating his own rock-god aspirations. I played in a student band and we once warmed up 'Free' at the student union. They were kind enough to allow us to use their amps after we blew up the union's Marshall - turned out it couldn't be turned up to eleven.

But I was not very good - my deficiencies not sufficiently obscured by generous use of the fuzz box and wah-wah pedal.

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Where did the guitar pictured above come from?

I forget, but it's been occupying the loft for many years now. Still, reading about Joni has awakened my inner music-artisan. My skills were always idiosyncratic, the bane of the autodidact. I can play a lead line and the usual chords, but fingerpicking I never learned: way too 'folky'.

Thankfully, the demeaning book also pictured above has a chapter on it, and I am instructed to spend half an hour a day in practice.

Maybe this afternoon.

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Down from the loft, I tuned the guitar and tried a few chords. My finger placement was very rusty and those callouses had long gone - I winced at the imprint of steel strings.

My plan for Monday is to encourage Clare to play three-chord, 12-bar background (A, D, E7) on piano so that I can do some (acoustic) lead. But really I should cast such indulgences aside and hunker down with a solo "House of the Rising Sun" - work away at that fingerpicking.

They say Eric Clapton's career bloomed once he discovered he could sing. Sadly, if that's what it takes, my second career is DoA .. a cat ran screaming from the garden.