Playing music was something I re-visited in 2015 when I was informed I needed to have a tumor taken out of my head. My neurosurgeon mentioned, a bit prior to the scheduled surgery, that I could lose speech. I asked "would I be able to recover it", and the answer was yes. Then he mentioned I could also lose use of my right arm or hand. Again, my question was "would I be able to recover use". Answer, yes.
So, I began to read even more than usual, and picking a guitar a good hour a day. With the guitar, the idea was to build muscle memory so that in the event I lost that control, I would be able to gain it back sooner than later. Fortunately for me, my surgeon's hand was steady and I did not have any issues afterward. And, I was making sounds with the guitar.
I had also come across the following article, which is also part of the Band Who Would Be King documentary, when searching for guidance with guitar playing.
How to play Guitar - by David Fair
I taught myself to play guitar. It’s incredibly easy when you understand
the science of it. The skinny strings play the high sounds, and the fat strings
play the low sounds. If you put your finger on the string father out by the tuning
end it makes a lower sound. If you want to play fast move your hand fast and
if you want to play slower move your hand slower. That’s all there is to
it. You can learn the names of notes and how to make chords that other people
use, but that’s pretty limiting. Even if you took a few years and learned
all the chords you’d still have a limited number of options. If you ignore
the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one
day.
Traditionally, guitars have a fat string on the top and they get skinnier and
skinnier as they go down. But he thing to remember is it’s your guitar
and you can put whatever you want on it. I like to put six different sized strings
on it because that gives the most variety, but my brother used to put all of
the same thickness on so he wouldn’t have so much to worry about. What
ever string he hit had to be the right one because they were all the same.
Tuning the guitar is kind of a ridiculous notion. If you have to wind the tuning
pegs to just a certain place, that implies that every other place would be wrong.
But that absurd. How could it be wrong? It’s your guitar and you’re
the one playing it. It’s completely up to you to decide hoe it should sound.
In fact I don’t tune by the sound at all. I wind the strings until they’re
all about the same tightness. I highly recommend electric guitars for a couple
of reasons. First of all they don’t depend on body resonating for the sound
so it doesn’t matter if you paint them. As also, if you put all the knobs
on your amplifier on 10 you can get a much higher reaction to effort ratio with
an electric guitar than you can with an acoustic. Just a tiny tap on the strings
can rattle your windows, and when you slam the strings, with your amp on 10,
you can strip the paint off the walls.
