Guitars Galore

About nine months ago, I had an idea, a revelation of sorts. Don't ask me where this wild hair came from, but I decided I wanted to learn how to play the guitar. Millions of people play the guitar, heck, there's a store up the street the size of a small grocery store called Guitar World. How hard can it be? I bought my acoustic guitar right after Christmas and tore open the wrapping, only to realize this stringed instrument was as foreign to me as the Latin language. So I called upon my friend Google to research basic lessons for where to even begin. And I ran across a quote:

" Sometimes you want to give up guitar, you'll hate the guitar. But if you stick with it,you're gonna be rewarded"
-- Jimi Hendrix

I'll be the first to admit, I never jumped on the Hendrix bandwagon. Many of my friends, early on in high school, developed an admiration (or obsession, one might say) with the guitar playing and lyrical stylings of the late Jimi Hendrix. I never thought he was anything special. Until the day I picked up this instrument and tried to make it play a sound that would have any sort of semblence to actual music. Boy was I humbled. And frustrated. My fingers were (and still are) sore. I've been hesitant to share the news with too many people, because I'm afraid that someone will (gasp!) ask me to play for them, and I will die of shame and embarassment due to the fact that six months later, I still don't know how to play a full song. [I blame grad school for stealing away my precious practice time.] But yesterday afternoon, as I sat amongst the mess of books and printed tabs, I heard the sweet sound of a few notes when, played back-to-back, actually resembled a song! And somehow, my fingers were the ones creating those sounds! That was just the movitation I needed. So I thought this would be a good time to share with y'all a few pics of my guitars (Pat bought me the Fender Strat for my birthday a few weeks ago. Using the language analogy above, how in the heck am I supposed to begin learning how to speak Italian when I've barely learned the basics of Latin?!?!)



I will never be pretentious enough to label myself a musician, because owning a guitar does not make a person any more a musician than owning a gun makes one a hunter. But I look forward to one day being able to play my babies songs as their daddy rocks them to sleep at night, and to bringing my guitar camping to provide some old-fashioned homemade music.

For now, I think I'll just focus on getting through a whole song.