I purchase the Line 6 Spider III amp as a late birthday present for myself a couple of weeks ago. It has been a while since I have had a working amp. Sometime during various moves the little practice amp I purchased in High School got fried.
My first impression shopping for amps was how inexpensive they had become. I paid $99 for my amp. In high school or college 15 years ago I would have paid much, much more for the features that came with the amp. It has a number of built-in effects and a noise gate. It also has four assignable presets, similar to a traditional car radio. I can dial in a clean, a crunch, a full-out heavy metal roar, and a clean/chorus for various songs. The only thing I missed out on buying the cheaper Spider is that I cannot buy a foot switch for the modes, but really, I am never going to play in front of people with the thing!
I have never been a very good guitar player. When I was in high school I hung out with some talented musicians that had formed a heavy metal band. I decided to get into guitar. I purchased an Epiphone Explorer at a pawn shop for $150, and bought the cheapest Crate amp at the local shop that had distortion. Soon I was memorizing Enter Sandman.
In college I like to play occasionally. One summer I was in a pawn shop (reoccuring theme) with my father and found my Gibson Les Paul. It was a steal (perhaps literally?). There are various models of Les Paul guitars. I had found the expensive one, the one that sales for $2500 new. We picked it up for just under $400.
I played (perhaps too strong of a word) this guitar that is much too nice for its owner for several years until I finally ordered a replacement pick guard and a couple of knobs to replace missing hardware on the guitar. It was time to buy an amp. So here I am. I have a beautiful axe and an amp that rocks. No excuse left!
I now find myself trying to do some small justice to my axe. I have started relearning guitar. I am taking a two-pronged approach. One prong is simply to relearn songs I knew 10 years ago. I started with Enter Sandman. Prong two is to start learning properly. I have started relearning the scales and chords. The last couple of nights I have spent trying to play the E Minor scale up and down. On guitar E Minor is the de facto scale. While there is plenty of music written in different scales, E Minor is very popular because the traditional guitar tuning starts with E on the low string and end with E on the high string. Additionally, all of the open strings are notes in E Minor.
Notice I said trying in the previous paragraph. Man, it seems like I can kinda remember the intro for Sandman, or the chorus, but playing a scale is turning into a challenge. Well, playing it slowly isn’t a challenge. But I keep wanted to strum up and down the scale rapidly like I knew I could do at one time.
I have set a goal for myself. I want to be able to play guitar with the proficiency I had in college by this next winter. I wonder if I will be able to stick with it. I hope so, because I remember that playing used to provide me with a lot of joy.
