New Guitar

I have wanted to learn to play guitar for years. There was a time when I was about 22 that I bought one and started to teach myself. I learned about four commonly used chords, a few strumming techniques, and then applied them to about 10 different praise and worship songs at church. My goal at the time was to play for the youth choir that I was leading at church. I played for them a few times, but I never really got very good at it.

If there's one thing I'm sure of, you can't really play any instrument well unless you practice. A lot. And guitar takes a particularly large amount of practice for two reasons. Number one is that in order to press down on the steel strings for any amount of time, you have to build up callouses. Number two is that you have to contort your fingers into crazy uncomfortable positions and then move them smoothly from one uncomfortable chord to another. I definitely need to work on both of those things.

My last guitar, a pretty Ibanez, was destroyed in the last house fire, so I knew that I wanted to find a good replacement. My goal was to find something that not only had a good sound and was a decent quality for a beginner, but also had some style and beauty. I have been looking online for some time with no luck. Then, last weekend, G and I went to this store called "Music & Arts" at Crossroads and I found this gorgeous, perfect-for-me Hummingbird. It's an Epiphone and I love it. I have been picking it up a few times a day and playing it a bit, trying to remember the four chords I learned years ago.

I talked to the people at the store about guitar lessons, because I thought maybe that would be the best way to go about learning. They offer weekly 30 minute lessons at $100 a month. Damn, I would like to be making $100 a month for only working 30 minutes. It made me think that maybe I should open a vocal studio here in Raleigh. But anyway, I opted not to take lessons and instead have purchase a CD Rom with 31 beginning guitar lessons. I'll let you know how it goes. I'm excited to start really learning though, and I hope I am good at it. It's such a beautiful guitar.