I'm married with two great kids, well young adults that is and one wonderful Grandson. Our family lives in sunny Florida and I'm approaching my 30th year with the same great company.
I would have to say my guitar experience is not that of a beginner, beginner, but somewhere just below intermediate. About 35 years ago is when I first became interested in the guitar. My favorite singer of all time is Elvis Presley. He's recorded around 500 songs and his gospel music is unmatched in my opinion. I only took lessons with a teacher for roughly 6 months and due to a troubled relationship I stopped playing and even destroyed the guitar. Thank goodness is wasn't too expensive. It was not until my family moved to Florida in 1988 did the guitar ever come into the picture again. A good friend, who's played guitar from a young age and is an excellent player, re-introduced me again when I was in my 40's. We would spend one night a week playing different songs, but I never really understood anything about music, theory or the best method for me to learn. We only did the after-hour thing for a few months and the guitar went back in the closet. It wasn't until my wife put the two guitars, the baby Taylor and a Yamaha my nephew sold me, onto a guitar stand in our new home that sparked a renewed interest. One day in Nov, I picked up Taylor and began to strum. Needless to say it was out of turn and the strings were in need of replacement. My lovely wife took the guitar to a local shop to have them replace the strings and basically do a setup, which had never been done. I didn't even know about setting up a guitar until I began searching the Internet. It was at this time I realized how much stuff was available on the net about guitar. A lot of it was You Tube and other was advertisement and after a hit on recommended sites I came upon Jamplay, which I couldn't have been more excited to find. They had a Christmas Special on their annual fee but I wanted to kick the tires first by signing up for their free month intro. Since it had been many years since picking up the guitar again, the beginning course seem to make the most sense for me, and boy was it. It didn't take long before signing up since the first few free lessons had me hook. Albeit I had some experience with playing some chords, knowing a few finger style patterns, how to tune using relative turning and the parts of the guitar, I realized how much other basic stuff I still needed to begin a solid foundation. Steve Eulberg was the perfect fit for me. Steve's style of teaching is so intuitive that I did not need to ask many if any questions. He hit on those areas that were missing for me. A lot of little things, such as how the chords are made up with the I, 4 and 5 notes, the minor notes. The dominate 7 and why it is called such. Then when I got to the scales, which you can call me crazy, but I love to practice. I really wanted to understand the rest of the guitar, basically after playing the open chords and what were all those other FRETS for. Now I know. I remember many years ago playing up the FRET, oh yeah, I now know the difference between up and down:) and picking notes between the E, A, D, etc., strings and hearing what sounded right as a scale. If I hit the wrong note, I knew it. But I never knew there was a simple pattern like Steve had learned from a friend in college. Now, when I practice I'll say the key and run through the pattern. Steve talked earlier about the Diatonic for scale as a warm up exercise and as you play from E to shining E and call out the notes it all fits. While going through the beginning phase I navigated to the TEACHING TOOLS form and saw the Pentatonic scale, meaning 5 notes, like the Pentagon, and decided to give it a go. It took me a while to get the G scale down, but afterward I was able to pick up the A,B, C, D,E and F too by using the G for the base. I'm still not sure if there's another pattern like the 2 4, 1,2, 4 and 1, 3,4 demonstrated in Steve's lessons but since they're the same basic patterns for each KEY there must be something in there to help remember each one. Near the closing of the beginning lesson Steve talks about it being okay to stray away from where you're currently focused to pick up something unfamiliar or whatever your driver might be. Needless to say, I'm a huge Jamplay fan and subscriber and would recommend the product to anyone wanting to play the guitar. It's interesting to hear so many stories that are closely aligned to my own experience, but this time I am in for the long haul. The tools are in clicks reach and the time I use to spend working after hours for my job are now dedicated to practice. I cannot get enough of it and I hope this feeling will continue for a long time to come. |