Because geek is cool and clever

Guitar Man, man March 3, 2008

A good proportion of my misspent youth was used up strumming or thrashing away on guitars. Despite owning a rather excellent Fender Telecaster, I’ve always had a soft spot for the sound of an acoustic guitar and strumming away to a favourite Beatles composition.

About 10 years ago when my daughter was born, my time on the guitar gradually grew less and less until the lid closed for a final time on the Telecaster and my (never great) acoustic sat and gathered dust.

But the times they are a-changing! Mollie recently expressed an interest in learning the guitar having slowed right down on her piano practice and you’d have to redefine the term ‘proud dad’ if I was ever to get to watch her in a band so Saturday saw us in the unfortunately-named PMT (Professional Music Technology) on the Cowley Road.

I took the old Tele in for a service. It fell pray to a few knocks back in the day and I never really looked after it as much as it deserved so a few things need tightening or replacing and after almost 10 years of inactivity I think I can treat it to a new set of professionally applied strings.

Since switching to Apple Macs a year ago, I’ve been tinkering around on Garage Band on OS X, which is a fully-fledged recording studio application, able to take software tracks and hardware tracks and mix them together. With only passing effort, the results can actually prove quite effective (although my singing voice isn’t quite what it used to be!). When the Tele comes back from PMT I shall be using it to record some tracks in Garage Band and we’ll see what comes out. I don’t wish to deafen or attract the wrath of my neighbours so I laid down £20 on a diddy Marshall amplifier (actually not made by Marshall surprisingly enough) that weighs in at a hardly eye-watering 1 watt output. It’s certainly not going to sound too great but it looks the part and will do well for practice.

I’ve also got the task of teaching Mollie the basic chords before both of us embark on some proper lessons in the coming months. This is going to be fun!