Personal Narrative Essay: Learning to Play the Guitar

📌Category: Entertainment, Experience, Hobby, Life, Music, Myself
📌Words: 793
📌Pages: 3
📌Published: 15 January 2022

Learning an instrument is a difficult task. Most people who decide to pick up an instrument eventually give up because it is a lot of work. The process is long, but the result of your hard work is worth it. I play guitar, and I started when I was about 12 years old. I was highly motivated by the music I listened to, so I decided to give it a whirl. One feeling in learning guitar was particularly distinct to me, and that was learning my first song. 

The muffled and static sound of my notoriously lousy guitar amplifier could be compared to that of a "can of bees." And when I was home, my family could hear it throughout the entire house. At this point, my playing was not music; it was just noise. My guitar amplifier was a little black box with four light-up buttons, a few silver knobs, and a power switch—the epitome of a basic guitar amplifier. There were four buttons on my guitar amp: Clean, crunch, metal, and extreme. Based on my music appetite for Guns n Roses, Metalica, Greenday, and Nirvana, Needless to say, my amp was always on the "extreme" setting. (Max distortion) The amp was digital, so there was always something off about the sound of it. It lacked warmth and character; it didn't have much soul. However, it did have a few nifty effects like reverb, delay, and a phaser in case I wanted my guitar to sound like a spaceship. My amp, in particular, was the laughing stock of guitar amps, which you cant expect something spectacular out of a 200$ amp. I didn't care; I had so much fun with that tiny black box that emitted sounds similar to TV static. The guitar plugged into the amp was a Les Paul-style guitar made by Epiphone, a starter guitar for sure. My father had gotten it for me as payment after working with him one day as his helper. The guitar was light; it was orange in the center and faded into red around the sides. It had rough fret edges and cheap tuning machines. It was thin with a satin finish, basic looking; I loved it. 

Every day after school, I would come home and rock out on my guitar in the basement of my house. At the time, we lived in a little white house on a dated street in Berea, Kentucky. My brother and I lived in the unfinished basement of the house, like a couple of goblins. The room had white planks as the walls, and the carpet was an odd color. It had a musty smell like rainwater had leaked onto the carpet from the cracked ceiling. Our room led to a smaller room that contained a heat pump and the stairway to upstairs. Unfortunately, they were wooden, and I was never sure if they were going to crash down one day, sending me to my fate 5 ft below. Nevertheless, this house was the setting in which I learned a great deal about the guitar. In the basement after school, I would watch videos of my favorite guitarists and tutorial videos on how to play like them. My fingers never seemed to want to go where the right notes were. It seemed like acrobatics how some guitarists moved their fingers so fluidly and accurately across the fretboard; this is what I aspired to be. Hours on end, I would practice different chords and simple progressions to familiarize myself with the fretboard. I was working my way up to playing a complete song. I remember playing a straightforward progression and thinking I was the bomb, just a basic E-minor G progression with alternate picking. Sometimes, I would hear a more intermediate song and test my luck by trying to learn it, my fingers always ended up in knots, and their tips ripped to shreds. Learning a new hobby is so frustrating because it takes time, effort, and many failed attempts. Day after day, I would practice the same old chord progressions and picking patterns, praying that I would magically turn into Slash one day.

After every practice session, I felt like I was getting better. My hand was moving more accurately, I was eliminating fret buzz, and my playing sounded smoother. I was proud of what I was accomplishing, but I wasn't going to stop there. One afternoon I was listening to music on the bus ride home. I came across a song I hadn't heard before. "R U Mine?" by the Arctic Monkeys. The piece had a simple riff that sounded like it would be challenging to play. I listened to it repeatedly all the way home, motivating myself more and more with each subsequent replay to learn the riff. When the bus came to a halt at my house, I raced past the empty seats, eager to get inside and start learning this riff. I flew down the basement stairs, ran into my room, jumped over the bed, and plugged up my guitar. Immediately I looked up a video tutorial online on how to play this song.

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