Some of my hobbies began because of the things that interested me, and some happened by accident. For me guitar is both a skill and a hobby that slowly became a part of my daily life without me even realising it!
It started with a really random day around 8 years ago. I was new to Ahmedabad so me, my sister and my mom went out to explore the city and discover new places when we came across a guitar store. That store looked really fascinating as I was pretty young and had never seen a guitar in my life before. As we entered the store, my sister spotted this tiny red guitar, it was quite smaller than the normal ones you see. It was small and toy sized but it was a completely real guitar and my sister absolutely ended up loving the guitar. Even the store owner thought the guitar was the perfect fit for me and my sister as we were pretty young, 5 and 7 respectively. So, without thinking too much about it at the time, we ended up buying it.
For the first few days, it was really exciting. My sister and I used to have fights about who would play the guitar for a really long time and we played with it a little and tried to learn new songs by ourselves, but eventually it became boring and just sat in a corner for a long time. No one really used it and it became one of the things that just existed but wasn’t ever used.
But one day, things changed. My mom arranged for a music teacher to come home and teach me and my sister. At that time, my friends and I were already taking many classes together for many different activities like chess and Rubik’s cubes, so this was just a fun addition. The original plan for everyone was to learn the keyboard. I remember everyone being fully focused on learning the notes and practicing the scales but I didn’t really feel fully invested and interested in that. Then I noticed it, the guitar at a distance that I had for so long which was forgotten about.
And then, I suddenly got an idea. At that moment, I randomly asked the teacher and my mom if I could maybe learn the guitar instead as in my opinion it was a way cooler instrument and luckily, he knew multiple instruments so he agreed and so did my mom. And that’s how my journey of playing guitar started, from being completely unplanned and for a really random reason to me playing it for about 7 years now! That one small decision turned into the beginning of my journey with the guitar.
The actual learning process was a difficult and completely different experience. I still remember my first day when I started with playing the first 4 frets of each string and honestly, nothing sounded nice. My guitar wasn’t producing clean sounds (it wasn’t producing any sound by the way), my fingers continuously kept hurting and everything was way harder than I expected it would be. At that moment, I genuinely wondered how people even made this instrument sound so good. Slowly though, things started to make sense. I learnt a lot of new stuff like how each string had a name (E,A,D,G,B,E) and learnt about the different parts of the guitar like the neck, the head, the fretboards, and the frets. It felt like learning something that I never had any content about before and even the smallest things surprised me at that time! One of them was finding out that “pick” we used to strum or play the notes on the guitar actually had a proper name, “a plectrum”. Along with that, I also learnt the correct posture and how to hole the guitar properly so you can see what you are playing with both your hands, and that actually made a bigger difference than I had expected. What made it even better was that there wasn’t anything that I couldn’t understand or had to figure out by myself as every doubt I had was answered immediately and I could also learn at my own pace. Eventually, it was just me and my sister who continued the classes, she continued with the keyboard whereas I learnt the guitar. Of course it was still a very hard instrument. I tried learning the chords and failed miserably at first and it was so frustrating that I couldn’t press the strings properly, the notes sounded off and the worst thing, switching between chords felt impossible! But now, when I look back at it, it’s actually kind of funny how difficult those “easy” things felt. Above all that, I was always excited in the start, especially about the fact that I was going to be able to play the songs I actually liked, and that’s the excitement that kept me going.
As I kept learning, I had finally reached the stage where I started learning actual songs. The first song I ever learnt wasn’t Happy Birthday like most people would expect. It was Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, followed by Ode to Joy. At that time, even though they were really simple songs, they sounded amazing to me as I was able to play them! The more I practiced, the better they sounded and the improvement was so exciting for me and my parents. Around that time, my sister and I also had a sort of monthly competition during our classes. She played the keyboard while I played the guitar, and we would both get scored. Most of the time I used to win, but I still remember the one time she beat me, which just made me practice even more. Then, I realised that they’re completely different instruments and shouldn’t really be compared, but that’s what made it more fun, actually playing together instead of competing.
From there, I kept learning more and more songs. Twinkle Twinkle was the easiest, so it came first. Then Ode to Joy, which was recommended by my teacher to learn next as it was easy and sounded really good as well. After that, I learnt the Titan theme song, which is something almost every beginner learns as it is easy and challenging at the same time and a very known tune.
Eventually, I wanted to attempt learning something more challenging, so I moved on to chords. Chords are basically playing multiple notes at the same time. One of the first songs I attempted was We Will Rock You by Queen. (I said attempted because as you might have guessed, it didn’t really go perfectly). That still motivated me to learn more songs so I picked at random, which also used bar chords, which are obviously extremely difficult to play, especially as a beginner (I still cannot play them perfectly), so I used a capo, which is basically a small device that is placed on the fretboard which changes the pitch and makes chords easier to play as bar chords mostly aren’t required anymore!
As I improved, I started learning popular songs, mostly so I could play them in front of my friends and have fun learning them. But not everything was consistent. There was a phase where I almost quit playing the guitar completely. It felt very repetitive and difficult and honestly, it became very boring. I even switched to learning the keyboard for a while in the between as for some time I genuinely stopped enjoying guitar.
Looking back though, I’m glad I didn’t quit! My mom encouraged me to continue even though I didn’t feel like it at that time and I listened and that made all the difference. Slowly, I started enjoying playing the guitar again and over time I got much better.
Now it’s something I genuinely love to do. I play at family functions and it’s always fun when people sing along while I’m playing. Even at school, I’ve been asked to perform at events and sometimes even record videos for their social media just because I play the guitar. Sometimes, even younger students I don’t really know come up to me and talk about my playing, which is something I never expected when I first started. It is a small thing, but it makes the experience way more special. Over time, my learning style also changed. Earlier, I depended a lot on the teacher, but now I mostly learn on my own. I still go for classes sometimes, especially when there’s a competition or a school event coming up and I want to learn something new, but a lot of what I know now comes from exploring new songs myself. I used YouTube and different websites to learn songs, and I feel I’ve gotten pretty fast at picking them. Sometimes, I can even figure out the notes of a song just by listening to it, which is something I never imagined I’d be able to do when I first started.
Even now, there’s so much more I want to learn. One thing is the electric guitar as on acoustic guitar which is the one I currently play, chords are more common than notes so I always need someone to sing along. Another thing I want to try is fingerstyle guitar. I think it looks incredibly cool, the way some guitarists can play so many different parts like the melody, rhythm and the percussion all at once on a single instrument. Players like Marcin, who is one of my favorite guitarists, take it to another level, using the guitar not just as a guitar, but almost like multiple instruments combined!
It’s definitely very difficult, and I haven’t seriously tried learning it yet, but it’s something I really hope to learn and explore in the future.
Tanishq's World 
Leave a comment