The Guitar and other Instruments #

I am not sure how old I was when I discovered an acoustic guitar stored in our house and in the case where a couple of instructional books on playing this instrument. This wasn’t a very good guitar and I had trouble pressing on the frets to make any good sound, but in the case of this guitar, I found a steel, neck riser, and a book about playing Hawaiian guitar. I played with that for a while but it never really grabbed me. I was just starting to become aware of modern radio and the songs being played and they were not Hawaiian. Needless to say, that round of experiments did not turn me into a guitar player. However, when I was looking at that guitar book that was teaching chords, a light bulb came on for me as I finally realized that the scales and chords exercises that my teachers had me practice had a place in modern music. It did change my outlook in the way that I saw those exercises but something that I could use and it all started to make sense to me.

Because I was taking Piano lessons, I was able to read music, certainly better than those who had never taken any kind of music lesson. I think this must have been around grade five or six, in our music appreciation class we were taking up the recorder. Every student had to buy a recorder. I excelled at this quite well because reading the music was easy for me as I had several years under my belt. Translating that into the easy fingering of the recorder was not hard at all. I already had the pitch and the timing down. The High School Music teacher was using a system of chairs as the first chair signified the best of that instrument and anyone could challenge the first chair and if they won the contest they got the chair.

They held this same challenge in our recorder class. Doug Schultz who much later in life became my stepbrother was the first to volunteer for the first chair. I don’t know if it was the same day or the next but I challenged him and won the seat. No one challenged me that whole year. Because I was doing well with the recorder I was put into the recorder band that played at the Christmas pageant and other activities. In Canada, after you finish grade 6 you move on to Junior High for the next three years, and in little town Barrhead that just meant you start going to the next building over from the Elementary School. All the schools from Grand One to Twelve are on the same big lot.

In Junior High, I started playing the Alto Saxophone. This was an instrument I played throughout Junior and High School. Was in the School Band, and even had a marching uniform one year because we played in the Barrhead Blue Heron Day Parade. In my last couple of years of High School, I even switched around to a couple of other woodwind instruments like the Clarinet and the Flute. Somewhere in between Junior and High School I picked up the guitar and started to practice and play it. I was pretty good at picking up any song and learning to play it. Learning on my own I was even better than some of the older kids that were taking Guitar lessons.

This skill won me a lot of brownie points with the older kids in our youth group because I could play so well. There was an age limit to when you could join up with the youth group on Friday nights at the church and I think they lowered the age by a year so that they could include me. I always felt more at home with people that were older than me. I never felt intimidated by them, I always felt equal to them and always welcomed.