The Words - An Autobiography

An Education I'd Have Refused In a Classroom

A few of my new friends were interested in music. So I learned what bands were popular with them and started buying some CDs of my own. One of the new friends I met never went anywhere without his guitar. He'd sit for hours while people gathered to listen to him play. He wasn't particularly handsome, but pretty girls sat as near as they could with evident admiration, and though I didn't recognize it for what it was at the time, adolescent lust. When I expressed interest in playing, he invited me to his house to hang out and play several different guitars that he owned. He taught me some of the basics, how to hold a guitar and a pick, strum some simple chords, and, most importantly, how to tune a guitar.

I was horrible. My friend told me everyone was awful at first. Not to give up. Until my fingers were callused enough to play chords cleanly, that was at times an agonizing experience. He explained that was why most people gave up before giving it a chance. Everyone wanted to play the guitar or thought they did until they discovered that it hurt for the first few weeks. Most people quit after a day. So, I was already past the point where most people quit. All I needed to do now was practice, practice, and practice more.

That was why he took his guitar wherever he went. If not, he'd always be in his room and never see another human being, or he wouldn't practice. And he liked having people listen and was aware of the reaction of pretty girls who'd never have looked at him otherwise, and he'd never have gotten laid with a face like his.

I needed my own guitar, he eventually told me. Not that he minded me playing his, but he didn't want me to take them home, and I needed to practice every day if I wanted to improve, which I did, because if for no other reason, I wanted to have pretty girls smiling up at me. And, whether I'd have allowed myself to do it or not, I wanted to get laid.

My friend took me to several local guitar shops and showed me several guitars he thought were good enough to start. Unlike several of his, they weren't top-of-the-line guitars, but they were still expensive, at least for me. Then the owner said that he'd recently taken in a guitar on trade, a model that would usually cost double or more than some of the better guitars in the shop, except for a small, barely visible crack in the face. He didn't want the expense of having a top luthier do it right but was afraid if he'd tried to repair it himself, he would ruin the sound.

I wasn't yet confident enough to allow anyone other than my friend to hear me play. Nor did I trust myself to determine how well the guitar played, nor the quality of its tone. I was still learning basic chords and was never sure how they would sound when I attempted to play them. So, my friend gave a little demonstration of his guitar virtuosity instead. He assured me that the instrument sounded fine to him, and I agreed – it sounded great when he played it, as would one of those homemade cigar box guitars, I suspected. The crack didn't appear to hurt the guitar's sound. He couldn't detect any buzz or odd harmonics.

The shop owner explained that small cracks occasionally occurred as the wood cured, but he believed this one was stable and wouldn't worsen with time. And, both he and my friends agreed, it was a hell of a bargain. Every penny of what I'd been saving from my paychecks at the carwash was still ten dollars short of what the shop owner was asking, but he told me close enough and threw in a cheap case.

My friend was an amazingly accomplished guitarist. He'd played since he was twelve, and I was excited about all he could teach me. But that turned out not to be much more than he already had. He was several years older than me, graduating from high school the previous spring, and had some friends in Nashville who wanted him to join them. If he was good enough to play in Nashville, he was good enough to play anywhere. If not, that was something he needed to know, so he could start focusing on something else that wouldn't prove to be a dead end.

After he moved away, the only place I played was in my room, and my only audience was myself. But he'd shown me enough before he left to get me started. I figured out some more through trial and error and gradually improved even without him there to guide me. My only opportunity to play was in the evening, and never for long. When my mother and stepfather were ready for bed, one would holler up the stairs to tell me that was it for the night. So, I saved up enough over the next year to buy an electric guitar, a nice one. I also bought some equipment to record the random meditative riffs that I played through headphones. Since I wasn't keeping anyone awake, I could also play all night. How were they to know?

I discovered a wealth of online resources for guitarists, including a nearly endless list of videos demonstrating how to play any song I wanted to learn, note for note, in slow motion, with zoom-in close-ups to show the precise fingering and picking techniques. There was also quite a bit of guitar-specific software available, much of it free, along with the source code. What I couldn't find was an application to generate tablature directly from what I played and recorded. Not just the notes; I wanted all the bends and slurs too. It was cumbersome writing it down by hand, from memory. And it was a pain playing each section repeatedly, then stopping again to document it. I didn't understand why that would be so difficult. But it proved more of a challenge than I'd anticipated, requiring programming skills far beyond the beginner level - far beyond my advancement as a guitarist. Unlike learning to swim, I jumped in with no care how deep the water was. I just did it.

It took me months of additional trial and error to develop an application that not only captured the notes I played well enough to generate basic sheet music. With a fair degree of accuracy, it determined which strings and frets had produced those notes. But this was still not enough to produce accurate tablature, with pull-offs, hammer-ons, bends, and vibratos.

In the process, I discovered that a note played on a guitar was far more than just a simple tone, a ping, without duration or reverberation. Instead, each note formed a complex of interacting vibrations and harmonics, which were far different even when technically the same note, but played on another string and different fret, and far different yet when produced by some other guitar, even when tuned as near the same as possible. They were living entities within entire ecosystems interacting with their environment. They didn't only reverberate through the instrument that produced them but echoed throughout my room, off the walls and ceiling, and I had to assume myself – I could certainly feel them. And, of course, the guitars felt these reverberations and responded if loud enough. But I only had an opportunity to experience that when my mother and stepfather weren't in the house. Even though headphones, without the external reverberations, each note was amazingly complex.

I downloaded various oscilloscope applications to see them and observe the complexity of their waveforms. There were distinct differences in their shapes depending on how each note was played, picked, fretted, and slurred. And they played with others - other notes and the complex harmonic interactions of various chords. I could only imagine what occurred with multiple instruments in the same space. I knew, of course, I listened to recorded music. I could hear those interactions, but how would their marvelous, fantastical, dancing shapes appear? I'd never been so engrossed or engaged in anything in my life.

I had many late nights and tired mornings, and, no, I hadn't been up all night jerking off, as my stepfather accused me. Not that I didn't require the occasional break to attend to the hormonal needs of an ordinary seventeen-year-old young man. I also exchanged emails and had frequent late-night internet chats with engineers and musicians around the world, even physics professors. They referred me to ever more advanced support groups, the software toolkit technical support, the hardware manufacturers' technical support, and eventually the chipset manufacturers' technical support. I became quite familiar with some of these engineers. They were surprised to discover that I wasn't a senior engineer for some product development team or a software engineering or physics student. No, just a kid staying up late, playing his guitar. Most thought that was great and were happy to provide any assistance I needed. So I accumulated a significant amount of knowledge in software and related scientific disciplines and inadvertently received an education that I would have refused had it occurred in a classroom.