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Hi, and welcome to my first issue of "Open Tunings", a column that will be used for: open discussion between you and me, guitar lessons, Advice, and just about anything that you want to talk about. For the months ahead I will be writing a column loosely based around playing the guitar. The fortunate thing for me is that there are so many byproducts of playing guitar that I can probably bullshit my way through for the first few!! I figure I'll begin with who I am, what i do, and so forth. Well, my Name is Geoff and I live in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which is just about as West Coast as you can get in Canada. Halifax is a great place to be, especially for music. So many different flavors of music are right at your fingertips, so many worlds you can immerse yourself into. The only real downside to it is that all the really good places to go for music are licensed, so I have only really been experiencing great live music for about 2 years now. I play rhythm in a Latin instrumental group called Duumbeck. We don't sing because no one in the band knows Spanish! I have been playing for 12 of the 20 years of my life. Impressive numbers; maybe, but I am a pretty bad guitar player! I learned classical at age 8 and did really well, and then my teacher was fired "officially" because of job incompetence, but he was really fired because he was gay. This enraged me (imagine an enraged 8 year old, ooh I'm shakin in my boots), so out of rebellion I quit the guitar for years. Then a great friend of mine began to take lessons at the local conservatory, and bought a new electric. I had been learning on an acoustic when my lessons had started, so to have this electric around all the time was really cool. I picked it up, and then went right home and picked mine up again. I had forgotten everything, so I taught myself from scratch. So I missed out on a lot of stuff that I should know, but never really knew that I should teach myself it. (So if within any one of my columns you want to send feedback about a theoretical mistake that I make just email at the address at the bottom and I'll be sure to correct myself and the guilty article) I hope that somewhere down the line I get to hear from some of you, hear experiences you've had, guitars you own, lives you lead, etc, and also I hope that I get to help someone with a problem they've stumbled apon in this humbling, degrading, captivating and beautiful passion we all share. One final thing, unless you tell me ideas for articles, I will probably just use this column to promote my band or something, so send those emails, and I will actually get back to you. Take care everyone, and you'll hear from me very soon.
"Pro virile parte", Geoff
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