I remember the day I first played a guitar. The experience was otherworldly, almost as if I was godlike, wielding the power of music in my tiny hands. Of course, I played like crap- I had no idea what I was doing, hell, I was only 5 or 6 at the time- but I didn't care, and immediately fell in love with it anyway.
My first guitar was so precious to me. It wasn't anything great, just a cheap toy from Kmart, but it served the purpose well enough for my dreamy-eyed 6-year-old self. It was an absolutely miniscule instrument, painted a vivid shade of red, and shaped like a Stratocaster, a guitar that I had fell in love with after seeing it in a book about guitar. I cherished that instrument for years.
Years later, in 2018, me and my mum walked into a music store to look at guitars. I tried a few, one of which was an Ibanez of some sort- which very quickly sparked a fondness of their flagship RG line that remains with me to this day- and another, more conventional-looking, not to mention cheaper, offbrand Strat. We didn't plan on buying the guitar that day. But we did. It was only because we found out that dad had just bought my brother a very expensive fishing reel that we had an excuse to make the purchase that day. Obviously, since it was cheaper, I ended up getting the offbrand Strat. I was pretty upset by this at the time. But, some things get better with age, and this is especially true for my apprecation of Ibanez instruments, so in hindsight, it was worth it. This time, the guitar was made by a company called SX, and painted in the most gorgeous blue. I learnt to play electric guitar with that blue SX, with it I joined the school Jazz Band, where I performed for the first time, despite the guitar's horrible wiring issues that caused so much pain, the cause of which hasn't been found to this day. I gave that guitar away to a friend about a month ago, as of writing this, upon being pressured to do so by my mum, rather than upgrade it, for whatever reason.
The next year, I found myself being told that my classical guitar was limiting me by my then-teacher. It was getting close to the end of my last year at the school, and my teacher at the time was pretty laid-back in terms of his views on technique, to say the least. He let me play with a pick (which is a cardinal sin for classical guitar, in case you didn't know), and didn't even mind what guitar I played. So when I went into the same music store that I got my blue SX from, I was just looking for an acoustic-bodied guitar. So I got an Ibanez electro-acoustic, the furtherst an acoustic-bodied guitar can get from a nylon-stringed classical guitar. So when I tried out for the music scholarship at my new school, needless to say, my classical guitar style needed some refinement, to say the least. As a result, I barely touched that Ibanez for years, and it wasn't until 2023 that I finally got around to restringing it for the first time in its 4-year life.
In late 2021, I found myself on the brink of falling headfirst into the expansive world of guitar. I had impulsively joined the school Jazz Band halfway through that year, after seeing that they were holding auditions for the band when I went to go mess around in the band room with my friend, who played drums in a band- or rather, disorganised mess of a Silverchair cover duet- with me at the time. That friend is the same one who I eventually gave my blue SX to. Anyway, I went to try out just for something to do, but the bell tragically went before I had time to audition. So I was offered to come back another day, which I did. I didn't have anything planned for the audition, so I just played Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden. The whole song. On my own. But only the guitar part- no singing, backing track, or anything- and not even that was great. The notes were buzzy and messy, the guitar sounded out of tune, and the tone was just straight-up ungodly. But I got in, somehow. How exactly that happened remains a mystery to me to this day. Anyways, that year I was fortunate enough to inherit a beautiful 2004 Epiphone Les Paul Custom. I was so precious of it at first, not even my closest friends were allowed to play, let alone touch, it. Honestly, they still aren't (with some very rare exceptions, of course). That Les Paul threw me headfirst over that brink, sending me tumbling uncontrollably into the weird and wonderful world of guitar. All of a sudden, I had to know how and when to change strings on a dime, what intonation was and how important it was to maintain (I still struggle with that sometimes), and so much other stuff that's still relatively unknown to me. At first, the Les Paul was a challenge for me. The tone of it is so radically different to my other guitars, as is its design- the neck is seemingly attached on an incline relative to the body of the guitar, which, although a source of much more action (string height) between the strings and the body, feels really weird to play- but I quickly became fond of the guitar and all its little quirks. It has a place on my wall and in my heart to this day, and playing it remains an exciting challenge for me.
Up until partway through 2022, I was one of two guitarists in the school Jazz Band. The other guitarist, a much better player than me, had been there guiding and playing alongside me right from day 1. Then, all of a sudden, he left. I was on my own. It was at that moment that I started to realise how important my guitar playing abilities had just become. So I started taking lessons in electric guitar. For me, I found taking lessons in electric guitar to be very different to the lessons I had taken for piano and classical guitar in the past. I already knew a lot of the basics, so there was nothing about basic chords or any of that. I think the first thing I learnt was the major and minor pentatonic scale patterns. With those, I started playing solos, and with those solos, I started reaching my limits with the Les Paul more than ever. I quickly realised that as good as the Les Paul was, it wasn't suited to its current lifestyle of being dragged to and from school every Friday, as well as on the occasional other days when I'd bring it in to play it with friends. It was too heavy, and the tone was missing the single-coil twang that I have always loved.
And then, all of a sudden, it was 2023. It was the last Thursday of Term 1, and I had been caught off-guard by a concert that I didn't know we had. I didn't have so much as a pick with me, let alone my guitar setup, so at around midday, I dashed out of music class (which I fortunately had in the periods before lunch, when the concert was), and set to work looking for a suitable guitar in the school's modest collection. There was a nice Epiphone Les Paul, and a new one too (I remember seeing the packaging for it in the music block in the last weeks of the 2022 school year), but the intonation was awful, so that was a no-go. There were also a few Squiers, but I knew from experience how mediocre their playability was, not to mention their god-awful tuning stability. Then, I laid my eyes on a Fender Telecaster, sitting on the rack in the theatre where the Jazz Band was set to play in only a few minutes. That was my only hope at that point, so I tuned it up as quickly as I could. It sounded amazing, and the intonation was great as well! I started to grow fond of that silver Tele, even more so as we kicked off our final song, Want Me Back, as the bell signalling the end of lunch drew ever nearer. That song has a guitar solo in it- it's one of the few songs in the Jazz Band's repertoire that does- and it quickly became one of my favourites once I became the only guitarist. The solo drew ever nearer, and I remember clearly closing my eyes, almost as if to meditate a bit before the solo began, to calm my nerves and channel all of my available energy into the music. And it worked- I had never played a solo quite like it before. It was at that moment that I decided my next guitar would be a Fender.
Cut to a music store in the city, where me, my mum, and my brother were staying for a few days so that I could attend a maths workshop. I wanted to go into the store to take a look at some guitars. which my mum reluctantly agreed to. I was fortunate enough to have a 10-15 minute discussion with one of the store workers about electric guitars, in which he told me that the model tier of a guitar usually doesn't matter, since, beyond a certain point, the only difference is usually just a matter of where the guitar is made. With that in mind, I proceeded to ask to try the most expensive Telecaster on the wall- an American Professional II model. I loved it, but knew that it was way too expensive, so I put it back and tried some other instruments. Over time, I whittled down the mass of instruments to just three- a Player Telecaster, a Player Stratocaster, and a HSS Player Plus Stratocaster. Unable to decide on which one to choose, I asked my mum which one she thought looked the best. She pointed at the Player Plus. By this point, we had all accepted that we had spent too much time and effort to just look at guitars. And so we bought the Player Plus, got it set up with Hybrid Slinkys, and arranged to pick it up the next day, before we headed back home from the city.
And so, all of a sudden, I found myself in possession of a beautiful HSS Stratocaster, painted in a beautiful blue-to-white gradient that most of my school friends hate for some reason, not that I care- I'm the only real guitarist in the group, so their opinions are more from the perspective of people who see guitar colours on their own, rather than in the context of the rest of the instrument, like how I do. That guitar is now my prized possession, and I enjoy playing it more than any other guitar in my collection. I'm not really sure how to get the most out of it yet, but I'm getting there. And to think that it, just like my blue SX, was an early birthday present. Only this time, I knew how to play.