Just started guitar this February, and I absolutely love it. I got a Peavey and a beginner's CD for Christmas a long time ago, but I just wasn't mature enough to really make enough of it. I would drag it out every now and then and just kind of strum on the strings and finger some really notes, then throw it back in the closet for a few more months to a year. I guess I just wasn't at a point in my life where I could really sit down and learn something. At the time, I was always trying something, then giving up on it. A few years later I got the first Rocksmith, played it once, and didn't touch it again until this summer. I got frustrated at the game for some reason and just quit. It might have been something with tuning or actually playing notes, I forget, but I just remember being really upset and giving up. I got really bored one day, and looked at some guitars that I was left when my brother moved out. He never really got into playing and I guess he just never planned on trying to play again, so he left them for me. I heard about the new Rocksmith (Rocksmith 2014) coming out, so I though I might give it a try. I looked around for the cord for a while, couldn't find it, so I went to Guitar Center and grabbed a 1/4" to 1/8" adapter. A few hours, downloads, and tweaks later, I got it to work with Rocksmith 2014. At first I sucked, but it was a fun kind of sucking. It wasn't the usual "Fuck this - this is stupid. I quit" kind of sucking, but a "This is pretty fun. I want to get better at this" kind of sucking. I eventually caved in and got a legit Rocksmith cable (I found the old one a couple of months later in my closet), and just started playing every day. Eventually I started going beyond the standard library and bought some DLC, and then got tired of that and started looking into custom songs. The experience of playing guitar for me is amazing. I'm still fingering like an awkward middle schooler, but like him, I'm still having fun. I can play a few simple songs pretty well, and can see myself improving every day. I'll sometimes revisit a song I was having trouble with when I started and go "How did I ever think this is hard?" I went from kind of awkwardly strumming the strings with my fingers on random places on the neck to playing little riffs without even breaking eye contact with people - which make my friends jealous every time we go to Guitar Center. I just keep getting better and better and love playing more and more every day. For the first time in my life, I'm actually improving on something, and it feels wonderful.
Yeah, I really love that feeling of improvement. For the first five or so years I played guitar I was never that great at it, but ever since I've become passionate about music theory and production, I can feel my creativity exploding. What kind of music are you playing?
I've been playing a bit of everything, but mostly metal. I'll get into some of the lighter stuff, because it's fun to play, but I really want some heavy gauge strings to get into some brutal stuff (I know most don't like it, but more than just "scream like a pig and yell about murdering people"). I mean, I can downtune pretty low, but at a certain point, things just start to feel... slippery. The strings just get too loose and playing gets a little challenging, but it's still fun. I really want to get into the theory behind it all. Like, I know that this sounds good, but I want to know why. What are you into?
Interesting. Bass is something I would like to learn, but I've never had the chance to. What kind of techniques do you use, and how would heavy gauge strings affect that? My dad brought me up on classic rock, but I've since expanded into just about everything I can listen to. Lately I've been listening to a lot of outsider music; Jandek in particular is fascinating.
It just makes lower tuned guitars a lot easier to play. When you move around the guitar, the strings like to move left to right like you're doing a pitch bend. It just feels really weird to play at times. Regular gauge strings resonate at a high frequency, so you have to greatly reduce the tension on the strings if you want to play something like C Standard or Drop B, which I mess around with at times. Putting heavier gauge strings on a guitar allow you to keep more tension on the strings, which keeps everything feeling "tight" like a normal guitar with the standard E tuning, which is what I'm used to. It's possible to play low tuning on regular strings, but lower gauges feel better.What kind of techniques do you use, and how would heavy gauge strings affect that?