Whats your story?

[labguitar1003]

I want to here what made u pick up the guitar or bass and decided this is what i wanna do.
I'll share my story first.

  so i really started this as a late summer project, something to do thinking i would probably drop it. Back then i was listening to rap and country and never knew who Eddie Van Halen was and didnt even like guitar hero. it started out slow with a flamenco with 3 strings but i would jam for hours on end. then one day i finally went to our local music store and was amazed at the music they were playing, it got me hooked and inspired me even more. That winter my mom had a stroke and i was bouncing from friends to families houses during the period of 6 months, but the one thing i always remembered to take with me was my guitar. that thing got me through one of the most stressful parts of my life and to this day still jam out like its the first time i played. So my main influences were from popular videos on youtube, and guess who was popular at that time? Dragonforce, and to this day sam totman is still my idol. now say all you want but that band had peaked my interest with all the wierd sounds and stuff they do and i thought i wanted to know how to do that and to this day i still love making the pac-man noise.

 

[JaySwear]

mine really starts with my uncle and step grandfather.

my uncle always had a bass with him where ever he went. he told me stories about staying with Patrick Dahlheimer (bass player from Live) at his home in FL and about forming bands and things when he was younger. then he told me his friend worked at GC near where i lived and i went pretty soon afterwards and got a bass. loved it, but found all i really did was try to play guitar parts on it, so i went and traded it in within 30 days and got myself a guitar.

my step grandad got me into a bunch of music i normally never would have given a chance. he plays a lot of blue grass. and, being on the eastern shore of MD here, he's played in paul reed smith's annual music jam. so that definitely got my attention. he also scheduled and went with me to the PRS factory tour. if i didn't already have an interest in music i definitely did after that! especially with assembly and how things worked. plus it didn't hurt to get to play his 35 year old martin whenever i saw him.

besides those two, i guess it was just wanting to have a talent. i've never been particularly athletic. i wanted to play football in HS but never gained the weight i needed, and our baseball team was competitive. i've never been a great artist, and i can't sing to save my life. so i picked up a guitar! i'm not great at it, and definitely not "gifted." but i think i've learned enough at this point to call it a talent and i'm definitely not embarrassed to call myself a musician.

 

[B3Guy]

God wired me up to love the blues.  I can't get enough of it. So what instruments do I play? Hammond, of course, and the electric geetar.

 

[NLD09]

My dad played my whole life, but it never really interested me. I was always into music though, and when I got frustrated with the way my high school band director was towards me I decided I needed a new outlet. After seeing a Los Lonely Boys concert I went home, picked up the guitar for the first time, and learned "Crazy Dream" overnight.

 

[GoDrex]

Jimmy Page and EVH made me want to make noises. Specifically the ERRRRRRRRRRR sound in Whole Lotta Love and The Echoplex ending of Eruption. Iron Maiden got me into playing songs, though the first song I ever learned on guitar was a weird song called Under The Blade by Twisted Sister. So at age 13 I bought my friends cheapo Ibanez Iceman and that began my long downward spiral hahahaha :laughing7:

 

[The Norwegian Guy]

I litterally SUCKED at the footballfield (soccerfield).

THAT'S WHY!



...end of story

 

[tfarny]

Definitely started out as a way to impress chicks. That has never really worked though.....

 

[OzziePete]

Was doing OK in music playing the clarinet but I suffering a lot of mouth ulcers no matter how hard I cleaned the instrument. It made playing music painful.

Just prior to that, I had a 'shining light' moment with a music teacher at school. In those days we had to decide upon what was called 'elective' subjects after the first year of high school.

This was the early 1970s in Australia, we had changed Federal Govts. for the first time in 20+ years and the new Labor Govt. had instituted a lot of Arts Grants to bring Australia culture forward. One of these Grants was to get music into schools.

Our music teacher, if he could get an elective music class for the next year, could ahve gotten a lot of Grant money to re establish the music department which had fallen into disrepair.

So he was on the hard sell. In the first year we had to do all the elective subjects so we knew what we liked and did not like. And it gave the teachers a chance to identify students who may have a latent ability/talent/interest in the subject.

Mr. Suthers spoke to me as the school year was finishing and asked me to consider music. With an Arts Grant he could get me a classical instrument to learn (it had to be a classical instrument) & tuition could also be subsidised. He did this to a number of kids and ended up having an elective music class the next year.

I spent the whole summer break thinking about music and watching the odd music video that might have been available on TV in those days. Listened to a lot of radio. And realised that besides 'liking' or 'not liking' the sound of the music, I knew NOTHING about how it was made or how it was done.

Mr Suthers did say some magical words to me in that discussion and certainly made me realise there wasa whole world out there I knew nothing about, NOTHING. And raised my interest in how the sounds are made, how the pitch is decided, the structure of music etc.

So when I came back from Summer Vacation the first thing I did was to change my electives and get into music. Then the real wonderment started happening. And it's been a passion with me since.

I still have dropped jaw moments when I see Hendrix clips, still stop what I am doing when I see a Beatles or Rolling Stones clip. I'm near 50 now, and this all happened one magical summer in 73 aged 12 - 13. Mind you when you consoder the qualkity of music that was contemporary around me at the time, it's no wonder when I couldn't play the clarinet that I settled for guitar!

 

[Graffiti62]

What got me into playing the guitar was really more of a means of expressing freedom. Growing up, I had kind of a sheltered life and a mother that dished guilt out with a trowel. My mom and dad harped education on me so hard from the sixth grade til graduation that I never really had a moment for a hobby. When I turned sixteen, I bought my first car--a '78 Chevy Malibu. Great car--305 V8, two-door coupe, fast and fun to drive. The funny thing about the car was the stereo in it--AM/FM w/ an eight track. Since I was made to feel guilty about chopping up the dashboard to put a newer CD player in it, my grandpa gave me a box full of the old man's eight tracks. The first one I played was Deep Purple's "Machine Head," and things went from there. Once I entered college, I became more liberated and really got into Hendrix, Aerosmith, AC/DC, Zeppelin, SRV, and most of all, Rory Gallagher. I wanted to get a guitar like there was no tomorrow. However, that childhood guilt sunk in when I saw guitars going for triple digit money, and knowing that I'd be lectured on how that money could have been better spent. I was lucky enough to find a '96 Fender DG-5 in an antique store, and in bad shape. The neck was cracked at the heel parallel to the rest of the neck, the frets were shot, there were hippie stickers all over the top and you could tell there was a lot of fingerboard wear. There was a $20 tag on it, and I thought that if I really wanted one, I'd have to work at getting it right. I struck lucky in that it was on sale for half off in that booth. The first thing I did was stripped everything off that I could, put a new pair of Grovers on in it, glued the neck and put a new nut and bridge saddle on it. I learned on that and became decent enough to where I could do the basics. As I worked on it some more, I read into how guitars were fixed and assembled, and slowly became better at working on them as I went along through college. I became well enough in college to where I could set a guitar's intonation up, set up action equally along the frets, level frets, set up nuts for custom string gauges, rewire a pickup and replace a bad input jack, all for cost of parts and a case of beer. Since graduating, I've modified damn near everything I've owned, sold/flipped some of it, had one stolen on me (if you ever find a Squier Strat with a P-90 in the bridge, let me know), and so on and so forth.