Load up on tabs/and thank your friends

There was a time when I had no idea how to play guitar, like, at all. Last year I would bring my guitar with me everywhere I went, and try to pick things up as I went along. I always ended up handing the guitar to someone I was hanging out with, because they actually knew how to play. Eventually I got tired of not knowing how to play the guitar and having to hand it to someone who did, so I started getting serious about trying to learn. It didn’t go well at all, I had no idea where to start, or what to do. At the time I was starting to build up my singing skills, and had just done one of my first performances with my band (Not the high school class band).

I went over to my guitarists house, and we felt like rockstars. We had done a cover of Holiday by Green Day, and I heard him playing it while we were sitting around. I started singing along with it and we played through the whole thing a few times, and then it hit me; This guy knows how to play guitar. It was so glaringly obvious I had to laugh at myself. I asked him if he could teach me how to start playing guitar, and he did. He told me that tablature is a great first step to learning, and getting a feel for how the guitar works. He taught me Down With the Sickness and Smells Like Teen Spirit, and I instantly gained a hunger to learn more. All because of him teaching me those two simple riffs and advice on where to start, I started becoming an increasingly capable guitarist.

On the opposite side of that, my guitarist had been telling me that he wanted to start dabbling in vocals as well as guitar, so I gave him my mediocre advice on warm-up techniques and where your voice should be coming from (Your chest, singing from your throat is the quickest way to ruin your voice). I am nowhere good enough to teach somebody how to sing, but I gave him the basics of how to start, and how to project.

That is the great thing about being in a band, we only have three members, but we all are specialized in one instrument. Being specialized means we can teach the other members how to start, or play the instrument we are good at. It’s important to know what is going on, if the guitarist has no idea what the drummer is doing, things won’t run as smoothly as they could, and the same works for any instruments in a band. Knowing what everybody is doing, and the theory behind it will save a lot of tears and time. A band is one of the strongest bonds friends can have, even if you annoy each other, a lot.