MY FIRST GUITAR AND LESSON – Red Lightning
Learning guitar hurts.
Yeah, there’s no question. Your fingers will be like “whuuuuuaaht are you doing?!” I think this might stop a few would be guitarists from getting past week one. This was the situation with me. I had my first guitar and lesson when I was 14 and just starting to hear bands like Rush, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd. I went down to a local guitar store with a little basement teaching room. My dad took me and bought me my first guitar. I can’t recall what brand it was, but it was black with a pixelated red lightning bolt streaking across it. Beyond that, what I remember most was trying to practice afterward and experiencing first “hand” the physical pain of learning to play guitar. My Red Lightning Axe proceeded to gather dust for five years whilst I focused on girls and other firsts.
So, as I mentioned in my previous post, after my “awakening” at age 19, I took back to my practicing with renewed vigor and passion, this time enough to get past the pain. Red Lightning was sufficient for getting used to the thing, learning my first few chords and how to tune it (a major learning process in itself). It’s first chords for “Wild Thing” soon progressed to learning basic blues and some other popular fare, but soon I experienced what has since become my favorite part of making music.
MY FIRST GUITAR SOLO – The Magic of Jamming
We were doing our usual summer partying, listening to rock n roll, playing cribbage or hacky sack. The very same friend who showed me my first chords taught me my first scale – the most basic first position of a blues scale (also known as Minor Pentatonic). He put his white Fender Stratocaster into my hands – actually plugged in to an amp (a luxury I had not yet known, even though Red Lightning was an ‘electric’ guitar), and he showed me the notes to play.
I’m not sure what we were listening to, probably the Dead, but I started to noodle with the notes. He showed me how to find the key that the song was in, and for the first time I felt the Magic of Jamming. I felt like a fucking Rock Star. I felt Powerful. It was like wielding some Sacred Fire of Destruction and Creation all in one. That was it. If there was any remnant of whining about the physical pain of learning guitar, it was utterly gone after this. I made one step forward towards a dream that had yet to be born.
THE DREAM
I don’t know exactly when the change took place. It wasn’t an immediate goal for me – to “make it” as a musician. I just wanted to play. But as I fell deeper and deeper in love with it, I started to desire to live my life making music – actually making money at it. Having just finished 4 years of studying film, now thrust into the “real world”, I can tell you, my announcement to my parents of my dream was not met with a whole lot of enthusiasm. Especially dad. Poor guy. I think he had some predictably cliche expectation that someday I would “get serious” and come learn the business, work with him, get hitched and crank out some grandkids for him to play with, and we’d all live happily ever after. But the only thing on my mind after finishing a 4th long winter in Syracuse was getting somewhere warm as quickly as possible. After considering the possibilities, I settled on the Bay Area as a place that had sun, ocean, culture, and spirituality, and so I left. Off to build my fortune and live my Dream.
LIVING THE DREAM
It’s taken longer than anticipated, and truthfully, I’m not even there yet. But ooohhh, I feel myself getting close. As the title of my upcoming album speaks to, I am on the “Cusp”. The Cusp of a Dream.
Please enjoy the latest pieces of the puzzle. The two attached songs, “Waiting” and “Early to Rise”, are more jammy explorations than what I’ve posted so far. Disclaimer: these are roughly mixed. They haven’t reached perfection by any means, but the essence is there. Please share!
2 more songs to go (recording again tomorrow!) until the album (at least, the recording part) is done! Then it’s mixing, mastering, and printing, and then it’s the CD release show! So, keep tuning in for new songs and updates on when the album will be ready and where and when the release will happen.
Happy listening,
Shak
All tracks from the new album, “cusp” can be
now be listened to and purchased here.
Make it happen Shak!!!