Tune this electric guitar!
Why I’m afraid to play guitar - Pt. 1
Note from Riri: This is another gigantic essay that comes split in multiple parts. My history with guitar playing is a long and convoluted one so I’m going to tell it in two instalments - make sure to come back for part two next week!
In the meantime, I’d love to read your guitar (and other instrument) stories in the comments!
This year I gave myself an early birthday present - a new Squier CV 70s Tele Thinline guitar. It’s this natural light wood color with a beautiful mother-of-pearl-ish pickguard and I’m in love with it. I named it Daisy, short for “Desire”.
A couple of days ago, as we were sitting staring into each other’s eyes - me and the guitar - I suddenly found myself retracing the steps that led me to it and it struck me just how long I had wanted to get this guitar and wouldn’t let myself.
I’ve always been fascinated by guitars. The sound of an electric guitar has always seemed a mysterious mix of cryptic, sexy and badass to me, a sound so versatile it could take you to the top of the world and then hurl you into the depths of despair the very next second. I’ve had my obligatory crush on a guitarist at age 14 and soon after my best friend started learning to play, so I decided I needed that too.
Seeing as an electric guitar and all the related accessories would have cost a small fortune my parents told me I’d start with an acoustic. I still remember it - it was a Martinez guitar with metal strings and a dark purple body blending into black at the edges.
In principle I had an option to join my best friend at the group lessons she was frequenting but I was a defiant little thing. If I’d dropped my music school and vocal lessons cause they wouldn’t let me sing and play The Bee Gees and cool stuff alike, I certainly wasn’t going to settle for the choice of material in that course - let them play those idealistic songs about friendship, togetherness and the vastness of Russia’s fields - I was going to play The Beatles. Well, and whatever else I chose.
The only problem was: there was no YouTube, at least not in the form it exists today. Tutorials showing you note by note how to play that solo from “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” or that chord progression from “More Than a Woman” were still years away.
There were tabs. Many, many websites where people would post the way they thought various songs were supposed to be played. If you looked long enough, you could find a version that sounded more or less like the truth.
So I started learning by myself, spending every evening in the armchair in the kitchen, the purple acoustic in my lap. At first I tried those Russian campfire songs - for the simple reason that they were easy enough for a total beginner. I told myself I had to get down the concept of changing chords seamlessly before I could graduate to the cool stuff - and boy was it hard! My fingers just wouldn’t comply - and those were the songs with open chords only!
And then one day, quite suddenly, something changed. It was like a flip of a switch - I sat down to play, and the campfire song came out smoothly.
I immediately printed out a bunch of tabs for The Beatles songs and some German songs I was into back then and started learning those. A couple of months later I could play “Rocky Raccoon”, “Blackbird”, “Here Comes the Sun” and very poorly - “Julia”. I had also learnt a German song called “Kartenhaus” which was almost entirely based on fingerpicking.
Strangely though, I didn’t feel much more confident in my playing. It probably especially didn’t help that my dad would sometimes sit in on my practice and comment on my technique - which, admittedly, was pretty mediocre given my YouTubeless existence. He would say I have no idea how to strum correctly, that everything I did sounded amateur-ish at best.
Yet I persevered - I played some songs at school functions and at summer camp concerts, even though I was wildly anxious. People seemed to be impressed, despite my non-existent right-hand technique. That was inspiring. Soon enough I was harbouring the hope that maybe I could make the leap from acoustic musings straight to being a model rock star - if only I could get my hands on an electric guitar.
By that time I had turned seventeen and I was in the first year of my bachelor’s studies. Since I was in a state-funded spot, I was entitled to a very small monthly stipend payment - something around 50 USD a month. For the better part of that year I put the money aside until I had enough to buy that electric guitar.
Now, admittedly, I didn’t know the first thing about electric guitars, so my only option was essentially to go to a physical shop and get some sort of a professional advice. And so it was on an early summer’s day that a seventeen year old me, with my best friend in tow, walked through the doors of a music store next to our old school.
What happened next was every flavour of embarrassing at once. We asked where the guitars were and were told to go downstairs. There we met The Guy. You definitely know The Guy: it’s this middle-aged man, maybe just past fifty, wearing glasses, his long rocker hair tied into a ponytail at the back of his head. He was once an aspiring musician but has found nothing but disappointment in his pursuit of music. Now he’s a sales consultant at this god-forsaken music store, embittered by his fate and disgruntled by the enthusiastic youths entering the store, delusional enough to think they could just as easily walk into an industry so rigged and cruel as they’ve just strode through this door.
The Guy is very knowledgeable, he could tell you about every guitar on the entire floor with his eyes closed, yet he is also sarcastic and unpleasant, half-expecting you to know all he has to say in advance. Most importantly, he has a hierarchy of the amount of respect he can attribute to different kinds of buyers. He is sort of on the same wavelength with the occasional old rocker, politely impatient with the young dudes of varying proficiency and downright contemptuous with women.
And so we met The Guy - me, a girl, and my best friend, a girl alike. This was our first Guy and we didn’t know what to expect. He seemed unhappy with everything starting with my budget and ending with my absolute ignorance of all things electric guitar - as if he wasn’t the one who was supposed to enlighten me in this particular situation.
Begrudgingly, he did show us a couple of guitars within my price range - among them the black Squier Strat with a white pickguard - my future first electric guitar.
It was a long back and forth - trying the different models, pretending I understood a word from his terse, upper-intermediate level explanations. After an hour or so I settled on the Strat. I asked The Guy to hold it for me cause I had to go and pick up the money at home - I literally had it in a pouch, set aside to buy that guitar. It was all cash, a ridiculous number of small bills that I was too scared to carry around town with me if I weren’t sure I’d be buying something.
As I rushed back into the store - a young girl with naive eyes and an equally naive stash of small bills - I asked to look at the guitar again, still slightly uncertain. That’s when The Guy turned to me and said:
“It really doesn’t matter that much, you know. You’ll be selling this guitar to another silly young girl in no time”.
It was this phrase that stuck with me through all these years. Walking back home from the store, holding my new guitar tightly, I was not feeling the pure joy I’d anticipated. Plugging it in for the first time, I was not feeling excitement - I was feeling shame. I also had no idea about guitar pedals - remember, no YouTube! - so I almost immediately resorted to the conclusion that my playing sounded nothing like my favourite songs because I was just that bad at it.
The last drop came one summer evening, when I was quietly probing around on the guitar in the living room, door closed to avoid anyone intruding. It was nearly dinner time and my mom knocked on my door. She then opened it a slit and said: “Take a break, rockstar, it’s time to eat!”
Thinking of it now, I know for a fact she was trying to be playful, it was nothing but a harmless little joke. But the seventeen year old me - ostensibly destined to sell that guitar to another stupid girl - took it as a mockery.
Of course I couldn’t play it even if I tried, of course I needed to sell it! Who did I think I was?
I put the guitar back into its case, placed it in the corner behind the couch and never touched it again in the years leading up to my move to Berlin. I didn’t take it with me.
Come back next week to find out how I got my guitar back, why I decided to give it another chance and how I allowed myself to dream bigger - guitar-wise!
Until then I remain yours truly,
The Ririverse
It's easy to hurt a creative person
Thank you for this story-part, Riri. You asked for responses, and here's mine.
There's a 19th century British tradition -- probably a European tradition -- to treat music as 'an accomplishment'. The sort of capability that would be paraded for marriageability and for status among neighbours. In the 19th century that was very much a middle-class affectation, but it's the middle classes who teach music, which meant that by the 20th century, working classes had picked this affectation up too. It puts enormous and unnecessary pressure on children who are drawn to music not because of how it looks to others, but because of what they can explore in themselves.
That's *not* the tradition of folk music, either. Folk music is community music. Everyone participates however they can, and they learn from one another. That's how African American music developed, how bluegrass developed, and how early country music developed. If you're poor enough and there's music in your community, you can sometimes get a better musical tradition than the affluent do.
The mass-produced guitar though, cracks that 'accomplishment' affectation wide open. Any kid whose family is more than working poor can pick a guitar up (and even the working poor can pick up a guitar from a pawn shop if they scrimp.) It's a versatile instrument offering percussion, rhythm and melody. You get a lot of self-developed learning opportunity with guitar; there are enough of them around that you can learn from friends, and by the 1950s the earliest Guitar Heroes can offer aspirations too.
Unfortunately by the second half of the 20th century, corporatisation replaced middle-class Accomplishment as the gatekeeper of guitar-playing. The Guy in the music store isn't just a misogynist but a corporate shill. The more shame he can pile on you and the more he can normalise branding and status, the pricier the guitar you'll buy in compensation and there goes your opportunity to adventure and to learn.
So there's a lot of socioeconomic context sitting underneath your experience, Riri. I'd venture that it's not just about being female; it's not just about your family and it's certainly not just about you.
For me, it was a fight between the narcissism in my family (my guitar-playing was their social 'property'), the slavish commercialisation of music among my friends (they were fans of whatever was on the radio or TV more than they were musical explorers), and the contention between music-for-interest and all the other things I had to do to claw out of my family's socioeconomic circumstances.
Music for me was never an answer to 'who am I', because you can't even *ask* 'who am I' while you're trying to survive economically. The introspection of 'who am I' is a luxury of housing security, financial security, personal safety and accurate social reflection. You might need to build a lot of that before you can avail yourself of that luxury.
So music has always been a 'how' for me instead -- how to reflect, explore, engage and contribute. Just as cooking and serving food can go with anything, so can music.
Giving yourself the space to explore that is key. But that space must include safety, intimacy and respect. Establishing that is your first priority. The need to do that isn't some sort of shame -- it's fundamental, and its absence will keep smacking you until you accept that it was always your own responsibility to create it.
I think you're doing that, Riri, although you sometimes seem overly conflicted about doing so. Regardless, I'm cheering here.
But by the same token I'm not persuaded that doing it to popular acclaim is ever the best measure. Your popular success might turn music into an income, but commercial musicianship isn't therapy nor authenticity either. 'What is music to me' and 'what will others pay me for' often don't converge -- even among commercially successful musicians, and neither question answers 'who am I' (which may be part of why so many musicians are chaotic, messed-up folk.)
So music is a worthwhile adventure, but won't teach us everything. There are personal foundations that we all need to establish too. It'd be great if it all got solved with gold Youtube plaque or a double-platinum album but the history of music shows that it definitely *doesn't*. :)