Who was the reason you picked up a guitar?

Rokket said:
PM me your email address and I'll get it to you tonight. I think I have it on my rokket @ yahoo account, but I can't access it.

By the way, do you need the vocals on there?
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Just shot you a PM with my email address. And yeah, leave in whatever vocals are there--assuming the new ones will be in the same place.
 
I went to a school concert when I was 13 and some band did a cover of "Rockin in the Free World" by Neil Young. I've never thought about music the same way since. I was, at the time, caught up in that somewhat obligatory Nirvana scene, and I think I had Travis' "The Man Who" (Just checked - yep, 1999. Whoah, 9 years ago!)

I think something just clicked when I heard that song; It's so anthemic, but steers the right side of rock clichés. I suppoe I still don't fully undertsand why it gets me, but to this day I feel a little frenzied when I hear it, or any number of bands cover it. I think ti was probably the first thing I abshed out on guitar - my brother (32-20 Blues) played acoustic and I guess he showed me the chords.

On my 14th birthday, I bought a Yamaha electric guitar package (Mine was an EG112, I think it's been replaced by the Pacifica 012) in a catalogue retailer. In June of that year, I saw Neil Young and Crazy Horse live - again, my brother bought the tickets and brought me with his friends. Still the best gig I've ever been to.

So yeah, that's my story!
 
My dad was the inspiration. He only knew four chords but could play songs all night with those four chords.
My first guitar induced adrenaline rush came from hearing Don Rich's twang on Buckaroo. Second time came from Johnny Cash and Walk The Line. Third was the jangle of the Beatles.
Now my hair is turning gray and I still love those roots. Their cd's are in heavy rotation around my house along with Jim Campilongo, Roy Buchanan, Dwight Yoakum, Marty Stuart, Wayne Hancock and many others who remain(ed) faithful to the many facets of 'country' guitar.
It's just so cool.
 
i was a pianist first, a violinist second, and then a drummer (which has stuck better than any of the others).

i started learning the guitar because of...***shudder***...kurt cobain.

embarrassing as that may be, it might explain why i'm so lazy and terrible at it. :o
 
drossfile said:
i was a pianist first, a violinist second, and then a drummer (which has stuck better than any of the others).

i started learning the guitar because of...***shudder***...kurt cobain.

embarrassing as that may be, it might explain why i'm so lazy and terrible at it. :o
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Is there anyone on this planet that thought Nirvana sucked, besides me? :)

And Kurt was a very accomplished guitarist. He sounded his best when he wasn't playing. :D
 
You will find that there are a lot of folks on this board who would defend his music to the point of violence. I thought they were different when they first came out, but I was never really impressed. What I did find is that his songs were very accessible. I learned his entire library in less than an hour.
 
Rokket said:
You will find that there are a lot of folks on this board who would defend his music to the point of violence. I thought they were different when they first came out, but I was never really impressed. What I did find is that his songs were very accessible. I learned his entire library in less than an hour.
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That just goes to show how untalented he really was. It doesn't say much about a guitarist's abilities when you can learn their entire library in an hour.

I won't discredit the man for having one of the biggest influences on rock music ever, but I certainly think one of the main reasons he went down in history as one of the best musicians in history is because he died in his prime. I think he's definitely over-rated.

Someone's death is never cool, but I just really didn't have a connection to his music. It was more or less, "Damn, that sucks. Damned shame...," than a case of me being in tears over it. In other words, I'm not going to miss his music. Now, Dimebag Darrell's death was a different story. I felt a connection to his music. I can remember seeing a title on MSN.com or something about, "Heavy Metal Guitarist Murdered On Stage." I opened the link and nearly fell out of my chair. I just fell apart. Dime's death hit me right in the nuts. I still can't believe he's gone. Dime's death has about the same effect on me as Randy Rhodes' death had on a lot of other guitarists.
 
Alice Cooper played a Pantera song the other day on his show. Dime sounded like a technically improved version of Rhoads, but otherwise unremarkable. His tone wasn't much better. The singer was very forgettable--he lacked the balls of a Hetfield or Lemmy, and the originality of an Ozzy.

Nirvana still gets airplay every day in every market in the country . . . Cobain was a songwriter, not a guitarist. He mocked guitarists. He was right.

No one who doesn't get the Musician's Friend catalog cares who Dime was.
 
mshilarious said:
Alice Cooper played a Pantera song the other day on his show. Dime sounded like a technically improved version of Rhoads, but otherwise unremarkable. His tone wasn't much better. The singer was very forgettable--he lacked the balls of a Hetfield or Lemmy, and the originality of an Ozzy.

Nirvana still gets airplay every day in every market in the country . . . Cobain was a songwriter, not a guitarist. He mocked guitarists. He was right.

No one who doesn't get the Musician's Friend catalog cares who Dime was.
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Cobain can claim he was a songwriter all he wants. He never wrote a song worth a shit. He just found an angry group of people to appreciate his "Oh, poor me, my life sucks" diatribes.

BTW, I have no clue what "Musician's Friend" catalog is. I've never heard of it. I care who Dime was. As for Hetfield having balls, his balls sucked crawled up into his ass a long time ago. Metallica is a thing of the past. Nobody gives a shit about their new album. It sucks.
 
RatedZ said:
Hetfield having balls, his balls sucked crawled up into his ass a long time ago. Metallica is a thing of the past. Nobody gives a shit about their new album. It sucks.
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Hetfield's voice has balls; as for Hetfield himself, who knows or cares? But we are talking about 1991, not 2009. Metallica and Pantera are largely irrelevant now, but music would have been somewhat different without Metallica. That is not true of Pantera.
 
mshilarious said:
Hetfield's voice has balls; as for Hetfield himself, who knows or cares? But we are talking about 1991, not 2009. Metallica and Pantera are largely irrelevant now, but music would have been somewhat different without Metallica. That is not true of Pantera.
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How would music be different without Metallica? While Metallica certainly were some of the first pioneers of Speed Metal, nobody ever sounded like them or tried to sound like them (especially after Load), save for Trivium. They influenced more people to pick up instruments and play than anything else.

Listen to Kill'Em All. Sounds a lot like Venom, eh? Oh, wait, that's right. Venom was one of Metallica's main influences! :cool:

As for Pantera, there are a ton of bands out there that have a "Pantera vibe" to them. And then there's Alice In Chains. We've all heard Puddle of Mudd and Godsmack. There are a ton of other bands out there too that have a serious Alice In Chains influence to them.
 
RatedZ said:
How would music be different without Metallica? While Metallica certainly were some of the first pioneers of Speed Metal, nobody ever sounded like them or tried to sound like them (especially after Load), save for Trivium. They influenced more people to pick up instruments and play than anything else.

Listen to Kill'Em All. Sounds a lot like Venom, eh? Oh, wait, that's right. Venom was one of Metallica's main influences! :cool:

As for Pantera, there are a ton of bands out there that have a "Pantera vibe" to them. And then there's Alice In Chains. We've all heard Puddle of Mudd and Godsmack. There are a ton of other bands out there too that have a serious Alice In Chains influence to them.
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Uh, what exactly is your thesis here? AIC? That's out of left field, given that you are arguing against Nirvana and Metallica. The same is true for Puddle of Mudd.

I love the advice to listen to Kill 'Em All. You were, what, 9 when that was released? I think I've heard it :rolleyes:

The difference between Venom and Metallica is fairly obvious, Venom pretty firmly belongs to the D&D era of heavy metal, whereas Metallica is often cited as the beginning of the end of that style. It's hard to imagine going from Venom to Godsmack without a Metallica in between.

Anyway, what I am arguing is all very standard rock musicology; you can derive your own conclusions, but you're going to have to do a little better than listing bands that sound like other bands. That isn't how music progresses, that's how it regresses . . . a fairly good case can be made that Pantera was a regression.
 
RatedZ said:
That just goes to show how untalented he really was. It doesn't say much about a guitarist's abilities when you can learn their entire library in an hour.

I won't discredit the man for having one of the biggest influences on rock music ever, but I certainly think one of the main reasons he went down in history as one of the best musicians in history is because he died in his prime. I think he's definitely over-rated.

Someone's death is never cool, but I just really didn't have a connection to his music. It was more or less, "Damn, that sucks. Damned shame...," than a case of me being in tears over it. In other words, I'm not going to miss his music. Now, Dimebag Darrell's death was a different story. I felt a connection to his music. I can remember seeing a title on MSN.com or something about, "Heavy Metal Guitarist Murdered On Stage." I opened the link and nearly fell out of my chair. I just fell apart. Dime's death hit me right in the nuts. I still can't believe he's gone. Dime's death has about the same effect on me as Randy Rhodes' death had on a lot of other guitarists.
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Randy's death had a huge impact on me. When I was trying to learn to be a lead guitarist, I studied his music almost exclusively. As soon I as I figured out that I was not meant to be a lead guitarist, I started paying more attention to Billy Sheehan, Geezer Butler, and Steve Smith. Bass was my thing and still is.

I never claimed that Cobain was a guitarist. He was the leader of a band that found a nitch and ran with it. His death, while tragic, had no influence on me or how I played; much like when he was still alive. I've never really gotten into his music, and I still don't. But I do acknowledge that he influenced an entire generation of wannabe's, if only to show that a lack of talent will get you somewhere in the music industry. My 15 year old nephew can outplay almost all of the current hit bands out there. That's not saying a whole lot about them, but speaks volumes for him.

Dimebag never really did much for me either. I never found anything about his playing that made me want to pick up the guitar and really give it a try again. Actually, there are no guitarists that make me wish I'd stuck with it anymore. Most of the amazing guitar players already mentioned are too far out of my league at 42 years of age to really inspire much from me.

But I won't give up hope. There are a whole crop of new players that have seen through the bullshit of what is out there to give a shit about real guitar playing. They will find a niche soon enough, and the days of the virtuoso are not far behind.
 
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