My First Guitar

by Julia Crowe

  I think my mom and dad thought the guitar would be a hobby, but later on it tended to take up all of my time. They wanted me to go on to college and have something else to fall back on if music didn’t work for me. But being visually impaired and having to learn from books on cassette really just didn’t work with me. I basically spent my college years cramming guitar for eight to twelve hours a day. My junior year of college, I decided Nashville was where I wanted to be, and guitar was what I planned to do for the rest of my life. Since then, my mom and dad have seen me get a standing ovation at the Grand Ole Opry, which is the mother church of country music. And whenever I showed up on a new record, I’d send it home. Of course, my own first record is coming out now on Favored Nations, which is a huge dream come true for me.

  I live, eat, sleep and breathe the guitar, even now. It’s such a wonderful instrument that I want to have it in my hands all the time. I kept telling people all the time, even when I was seven years old, “Someday, I’m going to play at the Grand Ole Opry.” They’d give me a look like, “Okay, kid. Keep dreaming.” I ignored all that and said this was where my heart was. I knew that, with help from the right people, the industry was not out of the question. It was a matter of finding those people. Of course, when you go to Nashville, you’re on Broadway playing honkytonks and the typical barroom bootcamp kind of thing, so you’re like, “Oh man, here I am in a nightclub again with a bunch of drinkers. Is this really where it is? Is this really where I am?” For a while there in Nashville, I wondered if I was going to be a club player for the rest of my life. But when the TNN shows started happening, I knew Nashville was the place to be, because I sure wasn’t going to get discovered in Woodland, Maine, two hours outside of Bangor! I knew that music was going to be the focus of my life. So as many dreams as I kept shouting at people, I didn’t care what it was going to take, figuring as long as I kept reaching out to find someone who could help me reach the next level. Believe me, I did have moments where I second-guessed myself, thinking maybe I should have gone to college and gotten a degree. But really, I think it’s like anything — if you put your heart and your mind to it, stick with it and don’t ever let it rest, you’re bound to create some kind of a buzz somehow. When you love something so much, you just can’t help but keep at it.

  I’ve got a funny story for you about one of my guitars. Historically, whenever an artist signed on with Fender to have a custom guitar model made, Fender has never let anyone watch their guitar get built. But I was their very first. I was standing there in front of a big pane of glass and Jim DeCola, the gentleman who built my guitar at Fender, was in the paint booth. I’m watching through this big window and he’s got this big apron on, goggles, the whole works. He’s got the guitar body on a stick and he’s spraying the living daylights out of the thing with sparkles and gold paint flying everywhere. I looked over at my manager, Mac Wilson, and Bruce Bouton Sr., the vice president at Fender, and I said, “Wouldn’t you just doggone know it but they let a blind guy come in to watch his guitar being built?”

  I didn’t really even think about it when I said it, but the place just lit up. My mom and dad actually have the stick that the guitar was hanging from when Jim painted the guitar. Jim wrote something on it, like, “Here’s to the birth of Johnny’s new baby,” and he dated it. Mom said to me, “You get a beautiful, high-dollar guitar and we get a stick.”

  Andy McKee

  Self-taught fingerstyle guitarist Andy McKee is a YouTube phenom from Topeka, Kansas, with his song “Drifting” garnering over 40 million views. He is known for his Michael Hedges–style fretboard tapping.

  For my thirteenth birthday, my dad bought me my first guitar — a used, nylon-string Aria guitar, which had cost about $50. I had really wanted an electric guitar because I had been into hard rock at the time, but I wound up with this classical guitar instead.

  My parents had me take about a year-and-a-half of private guitar lessons, where I learned chords and basic scales. We had a piano in the house, but I did not really know how to play it. Sometimes I just messed around on it. The main reason I’d wanted a guitar is because, when I was twelve years old, I had heard Eric Johnson playing on the radio. He was playing an instrumental song called “Cliffs of Dover,” a really big hit at the time, and I had never really listened to much instrumental music before, especially guitar music. I thought his playing was awesome and amazing and that was why I wanted a guitar. Hearing him play is what started my fascination with instrumental guitar music. I was also into Metallica and hard rock bands at the time.

  The young Andy McKee. (Courtesy Andy McKee)

  Since I had an acoustic guitar, I did try learning some acoustic guitar songs like “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas and a couple of acoustic songs from Led Zeppelin, like “Stairway to Heaven,” and “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.” My family was encouraging, and my brother started playing the guitar at the same time as well. He was deeply into playing Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan while I was into Eric Johnson and harder rock music. And every now and then, we were both into trying to one-up each other.

  I actually have fairly small hands, so I learned how to play chords that were specifically difficult for my left hand. I wanted to stretch my fingers and make it possible to fret these types of chords. Later on, I expanded into using different tunings and exploring how to make different sounds on the guitar as well. I like to explore different chord voicings that make it possible to play a certain melody over a certain chord progression that might be impossible or very difficult otherwise.

  I was fourteen years old when I had first performed in a talent show at my middle school. I had a band with a few of my friends, and we played a version of “Enter Sandman” by Metallica. Because we had all just hit puberty, none of us had a voice that was deep enough to actually sing the song so we just did this instrumental version instead — it was kind of funny. Everyone else seemed to think it was cool, so we had fun.

  My first actual steel-string acoustic guitar that I owned was a 12-string Takamine, but I took off six of the strings. That is what I primarily play now these days. It’s similar to the nylon-string guitar for having a wider fret board, sometimes even two inches up at the nut, so it was not too bad getting used to playing on the wider fretboard. I bought my first electric guitar and an amp from a cousin of mine who played, but he’s about the only other musical guy in my family. I check my guitars and take three guitars with me when I tour — my standard pitch guitar, my baritone acoustic guitar and my harp guitar. I usually travel with all three guitars, so it is impossible to bring them all on board but I have some really good Calton flight cases.

  Playing the guitar is a way to express oneself, and I am not too creative in any other way, so I like to experiment with the guitar and find new ways of expressing emotions I have and turning them into music. That is the best part. It’s also great when people connect with you for the music and you discover a connection with others that you might not have had otherwise. We might have different lifestyles and philosophies but music can bring people together in a special way.

  Fabio Zanon

  Brazilian classical guitarist Fabio Zanon studied guitar at the Royal Academy of Music in London and is the first instrumental performer to be presented with the Santista Prize in Brazil for his contributions to Brazilian music.

  My first guitar was my father’s guitar because he was the person in our family who played. My sister, who is five years older than I am, started to have lessons when she was seven years old, so for me, from the age of two onward, there was always a guitar present within our house. My sister had a quarter-sized guitar so that was the very first one that I picked up. It was called Fiesta and it was a terrible guitar, very poorly made. My sister still has this guitar. My father’s guitar was a full-sized Di Giorgio and very hard to play.

  This was a big deterrent when I started to play because I had asked him to teach me when I was seven, and he would always say, “No, the guitar is too large for you.” Of co
urse, I tried and found that I could not even reach the f. It was very hard and I could not get any sound out of it. It was difficult because my father was trying to teach me to play chords. To even make a G Major chord was impossible and I went away from the guitar for about two or three years. He started to teach me again when I was nine. I still have my father’s guitar. The Di Giorgio is like a fat lady, very thick. It’s kind of dyed orange in color and flashy.

  My first desire was always to play the piano. I chose music, but the guitar chose me. I asked my father if I could play piano, but he urged me to read music using the guitar, and I became happy with that. I did not ever come back to the piano. It was very expensive; it would have taken a few years before my family could buy one. By the time they managed to save up enough, I was already fairly proficient on the guitar and did not care for the piano anymore.

  My father taught me to read music. When it came to multi-voiced music, I taught myself along with knowledge of music theory, which I learned from basic Brazilian books. We still had solfège, too, in school. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto, Handel’s Water Music, Hadyn’s Symphony No. 30, Mozart’s Symphony No. 4. I remember the order, and I can sing La Traviata to you from beginning to end, if you wish — and this is because we had these records at home. So there was not much guitar beyond Baden Powell, who played on television at the time. I bought Dilermando Reis’ records from a record shop and these were the exposure I had to professional solo guitar. I heard Segovia on the radio once, playing a very brief piece.

  My next influence was my guitar teacher when I was thirteen. I was very lucky because he used to work in a car factory and taught only on Saturdays. But he was just a brilliant guitarist, absolutely unbelievable, with the best tremolo I have ever heard. La Catedral by Barrios? Perfect. And he was a very uncultured guy, which was funny. This was my very first teacher, who had studied with Abel Carlevaro just by chance in his youth. I started to borrow his records, and the first I listened to were the Abreu brothers. That spoiled my enjoyment of the guitar for the rest of my life because everything comes in second after hearing them play. Segovia did not impress me much at the time. Then I heard Julian Bream, which was great and I was lucky. Segovia and the Presti-Lagoya duo recordings I have only started to enjoy in the past fifteen years. The technique of the Abreu brothers is unsurpassable. Even the very best guitarists of today are just as good. I’ve never seen anything beyond that.

  My first ambition was to become a composer with the guitar and I did do that for a while, but then I realized that becoming a mediocre composer is a lot of work. I attended the University of São Paulo for composing and conducting because there was no guitar course at the time. Only in my last year was an official guitar department created, and I graduated with a degree in guitar. I lived off conducting for two years. I had wanted to learn more about music and the best way to do that is to learn composition.

  My father pretty much told me I should pursue other interests and a sport as well. My father came from a very deprived background and managed to study, I’m not sure how, because he was working full time from the age of twelve. He loved music and the fact that I was doing it was a bit of self-realization for him. He was fulfilling his dreams through me and quite happy with that. He felt even if you love music more than anything else, it is important to lead a balanced life.

  The guitar is a microcosm of life. It is the horse to the Arab. It’s like a boat for the sailor. The guitar is my very life and is something so close to me and at the same time is so uncontrollable because the guitar does not do exactly what you want. You have to create a partnership with it if you are to produce anything worthwhile. I would never put the guitar away because the self-expression one has with the guitar is so direct. The way you put your fingers on the guitar is a direct contact with sound that I cannot get from anything else.

  I’m not naturally a fast player. I do not naturally have a good sound. Many people file their nails for the first time and achieve a sound that is already quite acceptable. Mine was not. I’ve spent many years working on that, but this is part of the enjoyment. I can tell what is my forte and musicianship, being part of my background, is what comes easily to me. If I have any difficulty with the rhythm of a piece or a formal understanding of the piece, that is something I can solve in a very intuitive way.

  I thought perhaps I might be a writer and had some poetry published when I was twelve years old. We had literary circles in my hometown of São Paulo with teenagers who read their poetry for each other. One of these meetings was at a music school, and for some reason, someone asked one of the guitar students at this school to come and play a few pieces. The guy played Villa-Lobos “Prelude No. 3” and when someone asked if anyone else in the gathering played guitar, I said that I played a little. So I played Lagrima, the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata — but my hand was shaking one inch away from the guitar. I was so, so scared. I managed to get to the end of playing, and it was not so bad because I did know those pieces inside out. But then I started to realize the inadequacy of my preparation. That is when I started to have lessons with the man who taught at this music school. That had been my first performing experience, and six months later I gave a proper half-recital of Carcassi studies, Villa-Lobos’ “Choros No. 1” and Visée’s “Suite in D Minor,” Bach’s “Gavotte en Rondeau.” I was nearly fourteen at the time. I would still get nervous and shaky but not to the extent that it prevented me from playing properly. My teacher was very thorough. Normally I learned a piece and performed it. What he had me do is practice a piece for three weeks. Then I’d put it away and learn something else. After a month, I would return to the first piece, pick it up again, work on it for another three weeks. Then I would put it away again and let six months pass until my teacher asked me to play that piece. You learned to play a piece anytime, anywhere.

  I remember playing a concert in Saudi Arabia, and the strings snapped in both concerts. I had to change the strings in concert and this is something I learned early, to always carry new strings. For me, forgetting the strings is like forgetting the footstool or the nail file. I am currently playing a Dale Perry guitar from Winnipeg, Canada. I had a chance to meet him at the St. Louis ’96 Guitar Foundation of America competitions, and then I had a chance to tour in Winnipeg and bought the guitar there. I’ve always played, though, on Abreu guitars from Brazil because among Brazilian guitar makers of international standing, Abreu was the first. I also have a Paul Galbraith guitar made by David Rubio’s son. I have two Roberto Gomez guitars. You can only have one wife but of guitars, you can have many.

  Jonny Lang

  Grammy award–winning blues guitarist and singer Jonny Lang has toured with the Rolling Stones, Buddy Guy, Aerosmith, B.B. King, Jeff Beck and Sting. He has also performed at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival to raise money for the Crossroads Centre Antigua.

  It was my thirteenth birthday when my dad gave me a guitar, a Stratocaster. Prior to this, maybe a month earlier, I had seen a blues band play in my hometown of Fargo, North Dakota, called the Bad Medicine Blues band, who were friends of my dad. And after hearing them play, I just fell in love with the guitar. My dad arranged to have me take guitar lessons from their guitarist, Ted Larsen. I ended up joining their band a little while later on as their singer and also played guitar a little. That is how I got started.

  I played saxophone when I was in school and played a little bit of viola, too. I liked the sax but was not all that great at it. I was more passionate about guitar and that is what I wanted to focus on. I’ve loved music ever since I could remember because I wanted to be a singer. I grew up listening to Motown mostly. Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder were my favorites. When I’d started playing the guitar, I was really into Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots and Jane’s Addiction. I wanted to learn how to play grunge rock guitar, and when I showed up at Ted’s place saying I wanted to learn how to play like Kurt Cobain, he’d told me that he could not really teach me that stuff, but
he gave me an Albert King record to take home. When I listened to it, I became hooked and started obsessing over blues guitar players after that.

  My parents were happy to see me focusing that hard on something because school was just a loss for me, sadly. I was a lazy, disobedient student with horrible grades and I’m not sure how I advanced from grade to grade after sixth grade, really. I’d made it halfway through ninth grade and promised I would get my GED but never did. Fortunately, music worked out for me. I’m lucky.

  One day when I was onstage early on, playing the guitar gave me the same feeling as the day my dad had taken the training wheels off my bicycle and given me that push that allowed me to experience riding on two wheels for the first time all by myself. I just felt like all of a sudden I could see my options in front of me and that I could do whatever I wanted. It feels like a breakthrough and it’s the same feeling I keep chasing with the guitar — unanchored, untethered — this entire feeling of the whole world open in front of me and that I have control over the direction I want to take. I had never realized this feeling was possible so I’ve become addicted to it. Places that I can go and the energy that is available at some points while playing, when I’m just being reckless and free — all that goes back to this place of raw emotion. The only way I can achieve this feeling is from playing and singing. That is what I love most about the guitar.

  The biggest issue I had with the guitar was learning to play vibrato. My Strat had a whammy bar on it and, with those types of guitars, you can shake the bridge with your hand and create a fake tremolo. I did that for a long time, and it was a crutch for me before I started to learn how to play tremolo. It was Ted Larsen from Bad Medicine Blues Band who made me stop doing that. Ted put all five springs on that bridge piece so that the tension was too great for me to slip back into that old habit. He told me, “You’re not doing that anymore. You’re going to learn how to play vibrato.” Thankfully he did that, because it was the biggest hump for me to get over. I’d actually almost stopped playing the guitar because it made me so frustrated. But I got it, one day.