Guitar Geek 001 : Getting Eddie Van Halen on a Standard Stratocaster
You can usually tell a fellow guitarist at a gig. They hang around at the side of the venue so they can get a good look at what you're doing on stage. They usually look quite passive and stare at everything you do. You know the kind of guys I'm talking about… they don't tend to tap their feet, get animated with the music. They're looking at something else, taking in detail. I do the same. There's an unwritten code with guitarists - we all want to be better at what we do, and we hate to think that we can't do what the performer is doing on stage. It sends us back to our practice room, whether that be the lounge, the study, the man shed or the room in the attic. We don't like to think we are inferior to each other…
My Guitar Heroes
When you achieve something and think that you finally arrived, there always seems to be one extra hurdle to get across the finish line. At least that's my experience. When I decided to be a professional guitarist at age 19 I imagined it would be hard to make a living as a musician however I underestimated how hard it is. If I could go back and tell my younger self what the future holds I'd make a lot of changes. I'm sure some of you feel the same, right?! Firstly, I would've taken the opportunity to get my A-level in Music, gone to university and studied to have a better grounding in my subject. Instead, naïvely, I thought I could learn all I needed to by myself. I bought many books on Music, jazz play alongs, I listened to as much music as I could in different genres I took my teachers advice of working with as many different musicians as possible.