I spent about an hour tonight trying to play guitar. My knowledge of guitar previously was how to play Candlebox’s Far Behind, and that there were two E strings. Don’t be fooled by the first of those two, many years ago I figured out how to read tab (as if it’s hard), and taught myself how to play a couple of songs so I could pretend I knew what I was doing with a guitar. Most of the bits and pieces have since faded away (though on one positive note, I learned how to play Crazy Train (Ozzzieeee) on the piano after learning it on the guitar) except for Far Behind. I’m very glad of this since I’ll always have one piece that I can feign knowledge of guitars with.
My brother, who’s been playing guitar for a little while now, is getting pretty good (especially when you consider that we’re a family whose musical abilities generally consists of the power to skip tracks and my father’s self-aggrandized saxophone demonstrations–though to be fair, he actually started trying to practice again a couple of years ago, and can now hit most notes he tries, most of the time). He tried to teach me Tears in Heaven, but I got fed up too quickly, and besides, wanted to learn something more memorable to me. So, I decided to try to learn blackbird, one of my all-time favorite simple guitar melodies. In the end, I didn’t really learn it (I must have had a lot more patience in middle school to learn Far Behind), but I did end up fooling around on the guitar and making a really simple four or five note melody that I eventually got Colin to write a song with. Then we got out his mandolin which I played the base line and serenaded my father who was very nearly asleep, and not all that impressed with the tune. I thought it was good anyway.
[Side note, I was browsing the tabcrawler website, and found this gem. Hint: Note the song and band, then scroll down to the comments.]