{"id":5256,"date":"2022-01-21T13:01:23","date_gmt":"2022-01-21T20:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/?p=5256"},"modified":"2022-01-21T13:01:23","modified_gmt":"2022-01-21T20:01:23","slug":"guitar-lesson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/archives\/5256","title":{"rendered":"Guitar Lesson"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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On our walk the other day, Marcia and I were talking about teaching and I was put in mind of the one guitar lesson I had in my life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I took up the guitar in 1970 at the age of twenty-one when I found myself itinerant and on foot and unable to bring a piano with me. I bought a nylon-string guitar with a very fat neck for seven dollars in a mercado<\/em> in Guadalajara and carried this guitar around America and Canada for a couple years, teaching myself to play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Returning to California in 1972 I got a room in Santa Cruz in a former motel retrofitted to be a boarding house and continued my self-directed guitar playing, though in my travels I\u2019d met other guitarists and tried their guitars and was painfully aware that my guitar was not a good one and the monstrous neck, among other things, was an impediment to my playing well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I dreamed of one day accruing enough cash to get a better guitar. In the meantime, I went to visit my folks in the Bay Area and accompanied them to a gathering at the house of their friends who had a troubled sixteen-year-old son known to be an excellent guitarist. When he made a brief appearance to get some food, I told him I was teaching myself to play the guitar and he invited me to come play guitars with him in the bedroom he shared with a half-dozen excellent guitars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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He handed me a beautiful slender-necked guitar and asked me to play something. I played a simple song I\u2019d composed and he played along on another of his guitars and made the song sound marvelous. Then he played a gorgeous jazzy song he\u2019d composed made of dozens of chords I\u2019d never dreamed of making, and I raved about the song and his playing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Pleased by my praise he said, \u201cHere\u2019s a chord that\nwill change your life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He played the chord and held his fingers in that\nposition for me to imitate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I had successfully played the chord, he said,\n\u201cYou can use this same fingering anywhere on the neck and make wonderful chords.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I tried the fingering up and down and all around the neck, and he was right; wonderful chords abounded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When I returned to Santa Cruz, my guitar playing improved by leaps and bounds and I wrote dozens of new songs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A few months later I bought a slender-necked steel string Ovation for fifty bucks, started a trio, and ere long we were the weekend band at Positively Front Street,<\/em> a pub near the municipal wharf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Which is all to say, a good teacher can change your life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Guru<\/a><\/em> a short movie starring Todd’s hands<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On our walk the other day, Marcia and I were talking about teaching and I was put in mind of the one guitar lesson I had in my life. I took up the guitar in 1970 at the age of twenty-one when I found myself itinerant and on foot and unable to bring a piano […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7249,7250,7246,7248,7247,4305],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5256"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5256"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5268,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5256\/revisions\/5268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}