Could I Play the Guitar?

From a young age i was fascinated with how music is translated from a thought into sound. I got most of my musical interest because of Queen. Watching Brian May play to such famous pieces such as "Don't Stop Me Now" and "Keep Yourself Alive" got me so interested in if i could recreate such songs myself. But i never was able to get hold of a guitar.

That was until my teens, i joined my secondary school and started doing music lessons and I was asked “What instrumen do you wish you could play?” And we were told to write it on the back of this booklet. I wrote “I want to learn the guitar”. From that day, I kept pushing my parents to buy me a guitar, give me lessons anything to start playing music. At that point I thought strumming some songs out of a guitar would be as easier as playing the recorder. I was so wrong!

Finally, after a year of begging, my mum handed me my first guitar. A unwanted, beaten guitar from a friend of hers. Three of the wires had been burnt off from a radiator so it looked like a beaten toy, a hand-me down. But I didn’t care, it’s my first guita. It had a Mexican look about it. Its acoustic nature made me so excited and even better, I had a teacher. A 27 year old in his attic. Not your typical teacher but he was definitely a great teacher.

I remember my first lesson, sat in a small room full of guitars. I learned what each string was through the rhyme: Eddie Ate Dynamit, Good Bye Eddie. That has never left my head. I fell in love, for two years I played the guitar. I moved to electric when I bought myself a Yamaha; a beautiful silky red guitar with an amp and I teared the house down with my first Queen song “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”. Playing the guitar allowed me to breathe and opened me up to music as a mentality.

Unfortunately, it all came apart. I felt out of love with playing the guitar. Life took over as I had my GCSEs, a girlfriend and everything took over. Life was changing. The guitar wasn’t treating me well either, I just wasnt learning enough and I couldn’t do what I want. My hands would hurt and I couldn’t hold any kind of bar chords. I learned songs that wouldn’t me. I felt like I used the guitar to increase my interest to people. With the combination of my health, my education, and life overall. I put down the guitar in my living room and haven’t picked it up. I look at it every day and wonder if I should pick it up and play. But I feel like I haven’t deserved the right to pick it up, to hold the guitar without doing it for me. I have a problem, I doubt myself and more than the usual person and I need to learn to build myself up from myself. I don’t think me and my guitar are done forever, just like I am not done with a lot of things and people in my life. I hate saying goodbye.

“Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones.” ― Keith Richards