Hi, I’m Rene. I’m the guy in red beside two guitar gurus, my brothers.
My Guitar Gurus
As a kid I loved listening to music from the radio and records (vinyl 33-1/3 RPM LPs and 45RPM singles, I’m dating myself here) but I had no interest in playing music with a guitar or any other instrument. There were no CDs, or other digital music sources then.
I heard music live from my mom who played piano classics by the likes of Bach, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky. She gave me, my brothers and cousins piano lessons the old-fashioned way. We started with solfeo (Spanish) or solfeggio (Italian) to learn pitch and sight signing then hit the piano keys while reading notes from the music sheet.
Boys will be boys, so I preferred sports, flying kites, playing hide-and-seek, and anything more fun than playing the piano. Eventually, reading notes to play the piano lost to playing anything and anywhere else but the piano. Years later I regretted this childish, immature decision especially when I saw, in my teen years, the advantage and attraction of musical talents with girls.
My older brothers took the piano lessons in stride and gravitated towards plucking strings, first with the ukulele, then the guitar. Being the youngest of 4 brothers, I learned the basics of guitar playing from my older brothers in my teen years. They were self-taught, played by ear, learned to read chords, tablature and later, as they matured, realized how helpful my mom’s solfeggios and piano lessons were for their musical careers. One of my two elder brothers, by now an experienced guitarist playing rhythm while the other played lead in a band, eventually gave me my first guitar lesson. He showed me how and where to place and press my fingers between frets and strum the strings. For the first time I heard how the keys of A, D or E, and so on, sounded like. My fingers hurt pressing those steel strings, and developed calluses over time, which he said was good, and necessary to generate the right notes from the guitar. Playing acoustic guitar with nylon strings would then be easier with the calluses.
I learned chord progression, even got to play pop tunes with simple chord combinations. But the one thing I realized was that after I played the whole song copying my brother’s chords, I couldn’t do it by myself. I either memorized the chords or read it from tablatures to play it again. My brother on the other hand could listen to a tune, and figure out the right chord, not be out of tune, like me.
Is having the ability to play guitar by ear, being pitch perfect, an innate talent? Are some people born and blessed with this talent? Conversely, can those who are tone-deaf, who love music just the same, be able to develop this skill if they so desire?
This website is my forum for the quest to develop the connection from ear to fingers to guitar music.
Cheers,
Rene