Probably didn't start by seeing some artist, although I was fan of ABBA and Queen for a while, and my uncle would push me some of his vintage rock LPs. Some of that never appealed or sounded amateur to me (Pink Floyd, Led Zep, etc.
) I was becoming a teenager now, so I knew better!
A few years before, around age 11, my parents had me take a few hours a week of music school on the side where I only remember us making attempts to sing and play the recorder. For the next year (that I never entered) we had to pick another instrument, so I picked guitar -- maybe because a friend would, or because...
what else??
My granddad probably picked up on that hint and had some guy bringing me his old Gibbon SG (
not Gibson). I just occasionally tried some one- or two-string melodies on it (ELP, attempts at Deliverance mandolin, ...).
Maybe 4 years later a good friend and me happened to become KISS fans (he also had an LP of Rush, Van Halen I, Frank Marino, ... and was more awake than me, with better LPs than my uncle
). One day his dad had bought him a songbook for the Double Platinum 2LP. I was mostly jealous of the photos and had no idea what chord diagrams stood for. My friend eventually did and played me some chords of Calling Dr Love. I was
amazed and would start to learn things from him and on my own. I think I was late with chords and preferred easy riffs/trying bits of solos.
That friend went on to take guitar lessons and his teacher pushed him into jazz(rock). I'm grateful that took us to guys like Carlton, Ford, Metheny, ... already in the early 80ies. We became jazz cork sniffers to a great extent, but I also got into Toto.
Meeting a new best friend in my army days, he got me into much of the (vintage) rock basics I had skipped. I dropped the cork sniffing and became more balanced in my choices. Never had the discipline to really study jazz anyway.
As for many years I was too scared to play in public, girls never factored into it. I wanted to be in a band with a girl singer so no one would pay attention to me.
Many years later a woman eventually did literally throw herself into my arms after some acoustic plucking...
Guess I never properly thought this through...
Wow... I just went back thru this thread. There are so many people that have been on this forum for more than 10 years and are still active, though many rarely post. I think that speaks volumes about Fractal Audio!
+ Having taken a break, maybe it's easier for me to see how many dozens great contributors left or became inactive... Compared to before, content is seldomly exciting or deep now... A positive cause of this may be that we already have so much quality stuff now. But let's not derail the thread
