Ahhh, my first guitar was..........

1poorplayer

1poorplayer

Power User
......an unplayable piece of junk , my parents bought me for Christmas. Sunburst, plywood body , tuners that wouldn't stay in tune , and a big chrome surface mount pickup that stuck up so high, the strings hit it while fretting a chord. But , IT WAS AN ELECTRIC GUITAR ! - or so I thought.
Convinced me at the young age of 8 , that i COULD NOT play guitar.
5 years later I played a "playable" guitar , thru a Marshall amp , and realized I actually COULD play.
Terrible thing to do to a child. My kids have no idea.
 
in the mid 80's my parents got me a Lotus strat and a peavey rage for X-mas. seen a kid at school with a guitar and showed him a guitar player mag with eric Clapton on the cover and told him I had a guitar like that(blackie) the guy said cool come to our band practice after school. I got there and that guy had a Charvel and a 1/2 stack. he was smoking and I was embarassed!
so I learned how to play and now have over 50 Charvels and 3 axe fx! I am living happily ever after!
 
Mine was a Les Paul copy, it was 50 dollars in a pawn shop. It was gold, and I played that for a couple of years before I stripped it down and painted it black in a dusty garage so the finish looked like crap. Some kid at school thought it looked awesome and gave me 200 bucks for it. DONE.
 
Low end Yamaha acoustic with very high action. After about a year, I inherited my dad's 1970 Guild F50. Huge difference!

First elec was some crummy POS from a Sears catalog. Then, a pawnshop something or other that was better. After my freshman year in college, I worked all summer and bought a 1984/85 Guild 280 or 281 Flyer with one EMG 81. Used that exclusively for about 15 years. Good guitar, but I didn't know what I was missing!
 
First one was an acoustic Yamaha FG-75 ...learned some chords then got an Alcivar sun burst Les Paul (loved Page's) Got my first REAL guitar in 81 ...Fire red Ibanez Musician FR-350...Still got it and has recently been re-fretted. Wowsers... next year it'll be 35 yrs.old....
 
I had an opportunity to begin guitar lessons when I was eight years old. But when I got to the studio the teacher saw I was left handed and
sent me home, as there was no lefty guitars available at that time, which must have be circa1952. I remember feeling crushed and rejected at
the lost moment. Believe me when I say it has stayed with me from that time to this very day. I'm over it, of course, but I sometimes wonder how
my playing would have turned out had I been able to begin my musical quest at eight, instead of 25. Probably no different, but then one never knows.
 
I think that's a shame.

I'm a lefty who just learned to play righty. I also wish I would have started at age 5 instead of 14. Piano lessons were helpful though.
 
Kay Les Paul copy in cherry sunburst in '78. I started playing my friends guitars when I was 10 (1975). At 11 I started helping out at a friends horse stables shoveling manure. I saved up for two summers until I finally had enough to buy my own guitar and little 10 watt 1x10 Regal amp.
 
Some little 3/4 size guitar when I was like 12 years old. Playing 'When the Saints Come Marching In' didn't do it for me, so I quit. Then at about age 16 I got some low-end acoustic after my best buddy and I would hang out and I sort of self-taught myself.

My first electric - which I still play regularly - was an Ibanez AS200 that I got in about '80.
 
1966 Fender Mustang, with a Standel Artist XII solid-state amp. At age thirteen, I could not for the life of me figure out why I couldn't get a rock tone out of that rig.
 
Ahhh nostalgic….

My first electric was a YAMAHA SE 312M, kind of a super strat, I worked for 2 months during school summer holiday (age of 16 or so, around 30 years ago) to buy her + a distortion pedal and that was my "real" beginning.


I kept the guitar for so many years although she wasn't played so much (had better ones during the years) until something like 10 years ago more or less when I decided to reduce my collection and she was sold as well as I basically didn’t played her anymore.

I was just keeping the guitar as a souvenir so decided to let her go for few $$$.

2 years ago I started looking for the guitar to try and get it back and actually found the guy (a kid) who bought it from me years ago, so I asked him if I can buy it back for more than he paid me but then the brat asked even more than I was willing to spend on this crapy piece of "wood"….so, she is still there, one day I know she will come back to me and then she will be in the corner collecting dust again, or maybe I should hang her on the wall as deco…
 
Harmony Stella acoustic steel string for birthday in 1972. Pretty much unplayable.

I bought a Horabi classical guitar three yrs. later. Studied classical while I woodshedded on borrowed electrics.

First electric guitar was a late 50's Gibson Melody Maker. Recently had it faux restored to original. Reliced Tone Pro Klusons, reliced Tone Pro stop bridge. Original pickup and original pots / cap. New bone nut.

Looks like a lovely old 50's les paul special now, sans p90.
 
Mine was an early 1970's era, no name ES-335 copy in sunburst, with rosewood fingerboard, sunburst, rocker switches to turn each P-90 rip off on/off, with rosewood fingerboard, that my 2 older brothers struggled to learn on. The neck was like a baseball bat thick and wide so it was a struggle for me to hold chords.

The neck pickup was surface mounted to the body. At it's lowest position, it made all the strings unplayable past fret 12 on the 22 fret fingerboard.

The pickups were noisy and sounded like AM radio quality when plugged in; the frequency range on both pickups was like 600 Hz to 3 KHz at the most optimistic.

The guitar was actually a torture device for anyone wanting to learn how to play. Even stringing it as a bass gave no relief.

No wonder the manufacturer did not put a sticker inside the body or name on the head stock.

One of my bandmates ultimately buried the guitar in his backyard after getting frustrated trying to correct all the problems with the engineering and construction of the guitar.

My amp was a Heathkit Tube amp head that my oldest brother built and gifted to me when he outgrew it with a no name speaker that laid on the floor with banana clipped speaker wires attached to it when I wanted to play. He took it back after I bought my Peavey TNT-130 with 15 inch Black Widow speaker. That sucker weighed close to 100 pounds as I remember it..

I struggled with the guitar for 3 years, saved up enough money, and bought my used Rickenbacker 4003 for $400 with case in 1988 after some serious haggling.

I never looked back or shed a tear about that first guitar.
 
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An old red semi-hollowbody thing, Silvertone or Kay I think, with an insane number of pickups and switches. It must have imprinted, though, because I play 513s these days.

Next one was a Green/Black burst Electra ES335 copy with a horrible Bigsby knock-off. Then a 1972 Gibson SG that I never should have sold.

Too many after to track...
 
The first guitar I had that I actually played (wanted to do it since about 10, but never followed thru even though I had an instrument) was a black Memphis Les Paul copy. I bought it from a schoolmate just about 30 years ago for $100.

On the plus side, he had gotten his mom to pay to upgrade both pickups to DiMarzios... So the cost of the guitar was less than the cost of pickups would have been. It sounded and played pretty well. Stayed mostly in tune except the infamous G string :cool:

Played that for a couple years until I got enough money to buy a new Kramer Pacer... And I've played floating bridge guitars ever since!

I ended up taking the Memphis to a pawn shop... And sold it to another customer who was there looking for an LP style guitar... For $100!
 
Mine was a Decca solidbody electric. Cost me $15 at a local second-hand store, and came with a matching 5w amp. I made a little shrine to that guitar in my teenage bedroom. Never had a case for it, and played it incessantly while learning the basics. I eventually passed it along to a friend when I had enough saved up for a better electric guitar. My first decent electric guitar was a 1980 Carvin DC150 that I custom-ordered. Great instrument with a very good range of tones.
 
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