When I Was A Kid...

...things were a lot simpler.

I first started getting serious about playing the guitar when I was about 17 around 1974. It seemed resources for learning guitar - especially popular music were pretty slim. Not to mention growing up in a small town didn’t really help matters on that account either. Other than buying sheet music arrangements for popular tunes, there wasn’t much in the way of tutorials around. If you wanted to learn popular or rock music accurately, by gosh you had to do it the old fashioned way - by ear.

My first instrument wasn’t guitar - it was cello and I had been indoctrinated into a formal way of learning classical instruments - even the Suzuki method was not popular yet - so there was very little “ear” playing experience for me. Consequently, all of my guitar playing peers and buddies were far ahead of me in the playing by ear department.

I remember the first time I saw a Guitar Player magazine. Holy cow, a magazine just for guitar players? I couldn’t believe it! A drummer friend of mine who also played guitar gave it to me. There was a lesson in there by Joe Pass. I memorized that little lesson and still use it to this day.

I also remember when to my knowledge the first accurate transcription of rock guitar soloing was published - the Led Zeppelin “Complete” songbook had solos by Jimmy Page actually written out. I seem to recall a general feeling at the time that blues and rock guitar soloing couldn’t really be notated. Yet magically someone had pulled it off.

Curiously, it seemed to me that most of my local guitar playing buddies had an attitude that if someone learned a piece of music by reading it instead of by ear they were somehow cheating. Just seemed like a means to an end to me. How else was I going to learn “Mood For A Day” by Yes’ Steve Howe? Heck I was just starting on guitar. And, there was no guitar arrangement available. I ended up learning it off of a combination of reading a piano reduction on sheet music and listening to the recording. Piano reductions with little guitar chord grids above the legit notation was the popular way of publishing at that time. Leave it to music publishers to take a solo guitar piece and publish it as a piano reduction. Ah, 1974.

With the proper tutelage I came to better understand how music composition worked and what to listen for and gradually after much practice got pretty good at learning songs by ear. Definitely something every guitarist should do. It’s turned out to be handy to have as many tactics for learning as I could get together.

I guess what I’m getting to is that now, there is a virtual flood of guitar information available. How in the world is any 17 year old supposed to wade through all that’s available and figure out what’s worth spending time on on their own? It was easy for me, there practically wasn’t any. Problem solved!

I brought in some recent issues of Guitar Player magazine to my teaching studio recently and had one of my students pick one for himself. It’s been weeks now - he hasn’t even looked at it. I wonder if when he does, will he find a timeless treasure that he uses for a lifetime like I did when I was his age, or will it be one more piece of information overload he doesn’t select to absorb?