What Was Your First..............

[Jim Takacs]

My first instrument was technically an elastic band, but then I got my hands on my Dad's old knackered nylon string guitar, and it all went mad from then on...

Gem, Ever Hear of that one??  

Psst... his name's spelt with a J...

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!    LMFAO!!  OK, To Be absolutely Humiliatingly Honest, I Work with a With a guy Named Gem, Well We always say its his " Drag queen Stage Name" But Thats what he insists on going By!   I Sincerely apologize JEM For Such Slanderous Disrespect!  I Deserve May Lashings! :cry:  

[gr8gonzo]

I Deserve May Lashings! :cry:  

Oh, suuuure. You wait until June to volunteer for May lashings.  

Oh, and that Casio was a nice try, but still not a match. My Casio was mostly a sickly M&M brown and a bit bigger than the 101.

[E.S.]

Actually, my first was a Casio too. I just can't remember what it was, and I had it many years before I even became interested in music at all. Some early 90's cheap model of some kind.

[Mouse]

The first keyboard I bought was a Yamaha PSR E403, which I got four years ago. I call it the P.O.S. because, well, it is. I use it as a controller to play with some soft synths I have. I hope to aquire a Roland Juno G in the Autumn, which I hope I'll be good enough with to use in some live environment.

[Dr.Ripper]

My first guitar was a brandless acoustic that cost 50$ from best buy. I was probably 8 or 9 I think? It was third grade I'm pretty  sure. I remember I lugged a cart full of my old children's books around the neighborhood trying to sell them to raise money for it

In the end (end of freshman year in high school) one of my very good friends was moving to Japan, so I signed it and gave it to her for free as a parting gift because I know she really wanted to learn play guitar...

I haven't talked to her in a couple of years. I hope she's treating it well...

[Pedro]

That was a nice thing to do.

My first "guitar" was really shared between me and my brother.
I have to put it in quotes because it wasn't a proper guitar...my Dad made it for us.
I was about 6 or 7 so this was mid/late-1960's and we weren't rolling in money so there was no hope of any proper instruments. We too had a seriously knackered but much loved upright piano and big bro had an Ocarina but that was it.
But, my 'rents' (as the kids say innit) loved music and were determined to make the most.
So with nothing but a collection of ply-wood and softwood, Dad built this guitar which weighed a ton, didn't stay in tune long and had frets made of round wire formed into wide 'staples' and hammered into the neck.
With a length of extremely scratchy thick parcel string for a strap and a triangle of plastic cut from a broken tupperware-alike box lid for a plectrum, we were good to go!
Intonation was all to balls and the violin-style peg tuning was ropey to say least but we cared not and loved it (and him).

Now you can buy a 6 string acoustic with strap, bag, pitch pipes, spare strings, plectrum, and tuition CD for something like £12. What's that, 2.5 hours wages?

[rogerg]

that is an awesome story!

[Mouse]

It is indeed. Made me smile!  

[RWA]

A Korg Polysix back in '85.

What the hell happened over there in '85-'86?!  We were all buying our first synth back then! :shock:

[tomskerous]

Poly800 back in 85, part funded by my folks for having done well in my O levels, bless them.

Still got the blighter in the cellar.

[Trapezium Artist]

I'm afraid I can't play a thing and am jealous of the gentle encouragement (ahem) my children receive from their mother to make the most of their piano lessons. I nevertheless love to twiddle and fiddle with my laptop plugged into the Midi interface of the Clavinova we have, and have long-since learned that pleasing ambient noodlings can be coaxed out of the ether just one finger at a time ...  

One of the first expressions of that penchant must have been in the mid-1970s (like Pedro, I is old, innit), when the school music competition gave house points just for entering, let alone winning, and I thought I might as well knock up something for the team. I opened up the top of our upright piano, dangled the mike from a bog standard cassette recorder inside, stood on the sustain pedal, and meandered up and down the black notes for five minutes, one at a time, doing whatever sounded nice.

I called it "The Distiller's Dream" (god knows why) and handed it in to the music teacher, thinking that I'd get a house point for entering and nowt else. Imagine my surprise when I won the instrumental prize that year, accompanied by a lengthy essay from the teacher telling me how my use of the pentatonic scale was creative and atmospheric.

To this day, I'm still not sure if (a) he was taking the piss and (b) whether anyone else entered  

[catherine]

Great stories, TA and Pedders!

My first keyboard was the upright piano on which I staggered through various grade exams in my youth. The last one I took (and passed) was Grade 6... got some way to preparing for Grade 8 but that coincided with A-levels and university interviews etc which rather took priority.

Fell in love with a Putney VCS3 at an electronics workshop at one of the orchestral courses I attended in my teens and always fancied one... ended up playing bass at university as I badly wanted to be in a band and playing bass seemed the cheapest way to be able to do so... finally got a MIDI-enabled keyboard about 9 years ago and a slightly better one with some nicer sounds (Casio WK-3700) about 2 years ago which I sadly don't have enough free time to use to its best advantage at the moment, although once things slacken off on the robotics front after RoboCup 2010 in Singapore later this month, and I just have the job and the family to contend with, I hope to carve out some time for music over the summer.

[Brom]

Yes, thanks for sharing those folks, especially TA and Pedro which I can really relate to, here's mine...

I had been fascinated by the electric guitar I think ever since I heard "Apache" by the Shadows when I was knee high to a sheep. With my Dad being a humble draghtsman and my mum having various cleaning jobs, spare cash was something we saw little of. I was offered violin lessons as we had access to one, something now I wish I'd taken up. Then one day the magazine "Everyday Electronics" published plans for an electric guitar, including pre amp, fuzz and home made pickups. I read that article till I wore it out. One magical school hol morning it all came to fruition, winding the wire from the core of an old radio transformer around an Eclipse horseshoe magnet I had a pickup. For the actual 'guitar' I got hold of a square chunk of pine and a longer thinner neck like length (One thing Dad had piles of was offcut wood from the carpenters shop where he worked which was of course intended for the fire!!) A couple of screws held the two together in a guitar body/neck like way and the pickup was wedged in place between some smaller bits of wood. The bridge was fashioned from a meccano shaft held by another meccano item. I had already "procured" some piano style tuning pegs from the school woodwork room (Sorry Mr. Rees). The nut was also made from a suitably trimmed bit of pine. All I needed was a string to see if the thing worked.

To this day I don't know how our small town in Wales supported a music shop. This was a place where only the violin players were ever seen to enter. So with some trepidation I found myself pushing the door open. I can still remember asking for "Your cheapest ELECTRIC guitar string please " with the emphasis on electric - and left clutching a Red Dragon "E" after parting with 14 pence of my precious pocket money.

What I also remember is the magical (at that stage acoustic) sound that came from that string as I tightened it up after fitting it to the "Guitar". The tuning of which was achieved by turning the tuning peg with a pair of pliers.!!

With much excitement I connected the pickup to an old valve radio that had a phono input at the rear. Did it work, yes, sort of, the faint twang of a string could be heard coming from the radio. What I didn't realise at the time was that a pickup requires several hundred turns of wire, and mine was no where near that. The Mag article did however state that home made pickups would probably require some extra ooomph from a transformer. This was easily obtainable from the stack of old radios that were the bain of my mothers life in the corner of my bedroom and by luck I chose an audio output transformer and I soon had it connected up and ready to go. The resulting twang that issued forth from the radio was absolutely the best thing I'd ever heard in my life! With the volume turned right up it made a sound loud enough to get my mother banging on the ceiling from downstairs. It had no frets of course, they were procured for the Mk2 (Sorry again Mr Rees), so I had to play my lovely guitar by sitting it on my lap using a slider in true pedal steel style, I didn't care, it was absolutely wonderful.

Later that day I was back in the music shop. "Can I have another one of those 14p ELECTRIC guitar strings please"

"What, you've broken that one already" came the reply

"No" ..... "I want to play CHORDS"

After that I drove my dad mad either by monopolising his shed and his firewood making more and more intricate models and playing them through his beloved Hi-Fi – how I got away with that is anyone's guess. Eventually he gave in and took me to Cardiff where a Columbus Les Paul copy became mine, and still hangs in my spare bedroom – the mods I've done to that over the years are another story!

[Pedro]

Cracking stuff. Love the way you write.  

[rogerg]

awesome. life is good.