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I was still shooting marbles. Piano was my first love at 7 but never had the opportunity to play and we didn’t own one.
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01-16-2024 05:02 PM
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All I did was play video games and sleep.. never had the 'luxury' of starting to play an instrument at a very early age. Even if I did I highly doubt I would have had the mental capability to seriously pursue it as I was blissfully unaware of the world in general and was content with my own laziness
Good times...
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You can tell some of the young guys from the old here, some were playing video games, others were shooting marbles
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Originally Posted by wintermoon
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Originally Posted by ThatRhythmMan
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I don't recall ever playing marbles, but tops, yes. You spun your top into a circle with others, trying to knock other tops out. We cut big slices into the sides, to make knocking other tops out easier. We made bean shooters out of clothespins. I got caught with one in my desk, once. It was loaded, so hard to argue that it was just a clothespin. Video games didn't exist, nor did TV when I was that age. It existed, but the signal didn't get piped in that far from the stations. AM radio was available, and I listened to a lot of it, but not quite the same as video games. My kids didn't even have video games until they were past 11, they didn't become a thing until then. Pong was available earlier in a few bars, but not for home use. I have a very hard time believing that i'm as old as I am. I never even conceived the possibility that I could get this old until recently.
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Just beginning to learn how to play guitar. I was listening mostly to The Ventures. Also listened to Duane Eddy and Chet Atkins. I really liked the jazz masters too. My first guitar was purchased by my parents in 1961. It was a Sears Silvertone and the strings were almost an inch off the fretboard. It sounded pretty wonky too. The guitar was in a Christmas sale bundle with an organ amplifier that looked like a wooden stereo console. You could only turn it up to about a whisper. However, it did have vibrato. Within a year I traded for a Sears Silvertone guitar amp with a 1 x 12" speaker. And I had swapped guitars with a neighbor for a Gibson Les Paul Jr with a single P-90 pickup. The new amp and the Gibson sounded much, much, better. I had a whammy bar installed so the guitar would sound better for surf music. Thus started my 60+ year journey of playing guitar (and 5 string bluegrass banjo and mandolin). My latest journey is learning jazz guitar. But it is a much slower journey vs other musical challenges I've undertaken. I love it though.
Last edited by jumpnblues; 01-20-2024 at 05:54 PM.
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I was spending a long summer on my grandparents farm in North Georgia while may mom and dad destroyed their lives in a very ugly divorce. I'd played around with guitars most of my life (can't remember not doing it) but never really tried to learn how to play. To pass the time I bought a classical guitar and started learning to play "Classical Gas" while working through Frederick Noad's Playing the Guitar. I had the record of Mason Williams and some sheet music that I think was only partly accurate, but between the two I learned the song and it was the first thing I ever played for an audience. Noad got me through the basics and by summer's end I'd also gotten back home and started taking lessons from a brick mason who played nights at local bars and AmVet gigs and such. At 12 I played with him for a gig on St Simons Island, Georgia, which I count as my first real musical public performance. Had my parents had a happy marriage, I'm not really sure I'd have turned to the guitar to pass a long lonely summer cutting my grand-dad's pastures and feeding his animals.
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Originally Posted by lawson-stone
Classical Gas was one of the first songs I learned to play when studying fingerstyle guitar in college. I believe I learned it from a Mario Abril book (who taught in Chattanooga, btw, though I wasn’t lucky enough to take lessons from him). I also had a Noad book for classical guitar and learned most of the repertoire there.
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Originally Posted by Doctor Jeff
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Originally Posted by lawson-stone
It was very much a 'Boom Ching Ching, Boom Ching Ching, Boom Ching Ching, Boom Boom Boom' book, but it taught me to recognised triads etc on the written stave.
Both my elder brother and I would have had a Futurama each by then. I knew a 12 bar in E and he would attempt to solo over it. Of course all the family loved it!
Didn't do my first gig until 2 years later (1969).
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Age 11, I was taking piano lessons and playing trumpet in the school band. Never got very good on either instrument.
I finally started guitar at 17. Two years later I played my first gig and have never stopped.
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I had just started playing guitar at 11. I started playing clarinet at 8 but stopped when I started guitar. I wasn't very interested in guitar and didn't work at it until I hit 14 when I started playing with my friends. Then I became obsessed with it.
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Originally Posted by sgosnell
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We had no concrete. We just scratched a circle in the dirt and played tops there. It was a small country school, and there was little or no concrete there or in the county seat. The streets were, and still mostly are, brick or dirt there, a few macadam, and it was just two-lane road through the village where I went to school. I lived miles away on a farm.
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11 yrs old would have been 1962, born and raised on a farm in the Ms Delta, my dad was working me like a mule...
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Originally Posted by sgosnell
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Chasing girls and begging for a real guitar. Isaw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan (was 2 years old) and started begging for guitars. Every time I got my Dad thisclose to getting me one, one of his work buddies would say something like, "I got my kid a guitar and after two weeks it was buried in the closet" and I had to start the begging cycle all over again. Finally got a used Strat hardtail with 4 added switches and an extra single coil when I was 13 when I had saved up half the $150 it cost at the White Plains, NY Sam Ash.
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Idyllic? I think dirt-poor is a more accurate term.
An interview with Henry Robinett
Yesterday, 08:49 PM in Everything Else