In the Beginning (Guitar)

These days I’m teaching guitar – informally.   And it brings me back to my earliest days learning to play guitar.  Here are my thoughts.

Guitar Learning 101.   My first attempt at learning guitar was at Marymount, with a teacher giving lessons, who we’ll call Mr. M.  Mr. M gave me some basic strumming exercises which bore no resemblance to any music I wanted to learn, and did not even deign to inform me as to their relevance or importance as any skill set I would need for any particular form of music.  Possibly they related to the Beatles’ skiffle origin, but again, I was arrogantly given these instructions without the least bit of instruction.  Needless to say I gave up on that immediately.

Guitar Learning 201.  Fast forward a few years – 1985 – and my brother came back from lessons with Joel (where is he now?) beaming that he’d learned the intro riff to Whitesnake’s “Saints & Sinners”.  Woohoo!  Now we’re talking.  The next week I went to Joel and started learning AC/DC and Black Sabbath riffs.  Not the entire songs or any solos, just the intro riffs.  You’d bring a cassette of what you wanted to learn, and Joel would figure it out by ear and teach you how to play it: he’d even write it down on blank tablature sheet so you could refer to that at home and practice from that. 

Of course, learning that way got us started out quickly, but eventually you realized that it was sui generis: without learning principles, you would need his assistance to learn everything and weren’t learning the basics.  Joel was happy to teach those if you wanted.  He also explained that reading sheet music was of marginal utility for a guitarist:  standard music notation was designed for classical instruments like piano and violin, while tablature was expressly designed for guitar. 

Guitar Learning 301.  Fast forward (not all that far, actually) to freshman year at University of Maryland, College Park, fall 1986.  I met a friend named Baron (where is HE now?) who showed me what I thought was impossible: he had learned, note for note, practically all of Black Sabbath’s songs – including the solos.  WHOA.  That blew my mind.  Eventually he let slip that he hadn’t figured them out himself, he simply referred to The Black Sabbath Anthology and learned them from the tablature.  However, that does take immense patience, for which he deserves superlative credit.  For my part, I did the same and learned the solos for various Black Sabbath songs, including “Paranoid”, “War Pigs”, “Iron Man”, and “Black Sabbath”. 

    But here’s something even funnier.  If you listen to live material, you’ll notice that Tony Iommi, Angus Young, and most other guitarists rarely play the solos note-for-note in concert.  In interviews, Iommi admits that he never had the patience to sit down and actually write a solo that way, or learn to play his own recorded solos verbatim.   So when Baron blazed away at these solos, as I did later, we were doing something the guitarist himself never bothered to do.  Alex Lifeson, of Rush, is among the few guitarists who meticulously works out a solo and diligently reproduces it live. 

Guitar Learning 401.  By my junior year of college, I had learned the secret:  blues & pentatonic scales, from the Heavy Guitar Bible.  Once I learned these scales, picking out AC/DC and Black Sabbath solos myself became simple, and the Black Sabbath Anthology – which I’d lost moving in summer 1988 and never replaced – became unnecessary.  I even managed to learn the extended solo of Black Sabbath's “The Warning”, and the solo to Judas Priest’s “Dreamer Deceiver”, on my own without any tablature. 

First guitar.  My brother and I started out on an old acoustic we’d had for years.  For Christmas 1985 we got our first electric guitar: an Ibanez Roadstar II (black, no pickguard, rosewood fretboard) with three single coil pickups, essentially Ibanez’ proprietary-styled copy of a Fender Stratocaster.  We still have this guitar. 

            For my part, I was enthralled by the Fender Stratocaster, but I realized that those guitars were too expensive to justify a purchase by a beginning guitarist.  Over the Christmas vacation, I worked at the Office of American Services (OAS), the US Embassy section which makes tourist passports.  I earned enough over 2 weeks to buy a cheap copy – by a company called Applause – of a Stratocaster, in cherry sunburst with a maple fretboard.  By November 1986 I’d replaced it with a Japanese Fender Stratocaster in black, rosewood fretboard, and locking tremolo (we’ve since sold both guitars long ago).  But the Ibanez and Applause were my starts.

I still need to refer to tablature for trickier songs, and I never did master the skill set of the Beatles’ strumming and skiffle basics.  But thanks to Joel, I started out on guitar and never gave up.  Thanks to Baron, I learned solos - and indirectly, learned to improvise on scales.  I imagine the next level will be learning the skill sets behind the Beatles’ and Grateful Dead guitar techniques.