Passing it on

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Originally uploaded by Xose.

When I was 14 and first learning how to play music, guitar magazines were my #1 lesson books. I would get Guitar for the Practicing Musician and Guitar Player every month and spend hours upon hours up in my room learning the tips and tricks (and whole transcribed songs) in those pages.

I'd devour the articles where my favorite guitarists would talk about their playing, their influences, and how they made the guitar do mind-blowing things I couldn't even hum, much less play along to! (My main men were guys like Jake E. Lee, coincidentally, another West Virginian; Randy Rhoads; Tony Iommi; Warren DiMartini; and, of course, the man who started it all for me, Ace Frehley, "lead guitar!")

For an obsessed kid like me in small town USA, those magazines were my connection to the best teachers rock guitar could offer, and it's no stretch to say that I learned how to play guitar well by studying those magazines every night (to my grades' detriment). Getting encouragement from my favorite players and hearing them in interviews tell me to keep practicing and learn more gave me the confidence to keep going and say "I can do this!"

Now it's my turn to help the next generation of guitarists by writing those very articles. Turns out that Guitar Player is owned by my former company, CMP, and before I left California, I pitched them on an article about home amplifier building, a new hobby of mine. Long story short, they took the bait, and my first article was published in the October edition of Guitar Player (see photo). Click here to read the article (you'll need to scroll down once you get to the Web page).

Since this first article, I've written two interviews for the upcoming premiere issue of FRETS magazine, the new acoustic counterpart to Guitar Player, and I just interviewed the Reverend Horton Heat yesterday for an upcoming issue of GP. The fact that I get paid to do this is icing on the cake.

I just hope that somewhere there's a kid in West Virginia who has just picked up his first guitar who reads my article and says to himself (or herself), "I can do this!"