When I was about ten, my grandparents gifted me an acoustic Yamaha guitar. At the time it was the coolest thing I owned, and I proudly carried it around my house with my pockets full of picks and dreams. I couldn’t wait to start learning how to play, and during my free time I would set myself up in front of my bedroom mirror, watching myself strum as I daydreamed about how good I was going to get, and how I couldn’t wait to show off my talents to my friends. In my mind, it was really only a matter of time before I was playing insane riffs to large, cheering crowds. My parents set me up with lessons with a neighbor and thus I was officially off on my journey to become a guitar master.
And I promptly gave up after a few months.
Look, learning anything new is hard, especially when you’re ten and have the attention span of, well, a ten-year-old. I really tried to learn the instrument, but with the amount of effort it took, coupled with the fact that guitar playing can be especially rough on your fingers–talk about calluses!–it was really only a matter of time before my adolescent mind had moved on to other things. And so, for the next fifteen years that guitar sat in a corner of my room, undisturbed and collecting dust like a forgotten photo album. In the meantime I was going through school, every now and then spotting a friend playing an instrument and wondering what could have been.
So where to begin? Well, the first thing I did, as I’d assume any millennial would, is go to Youtube for direction. There I found synthesia renditions, which, for the uninitiated, are basically tutorials that tell you which keys to play at what time (you can check out an example HERE). I started memorizing the notes and I actually managed to get a full song down. But since those tutorials don’t go far in teaching you how to read actual sheet music, I found a teacher and began taking lessons.
Adam's Soapbox 