When I was a little kid, my mom had "hootenannies" with her friends were they would hang out, drink wine & play folk music. Probably as a way to keep me out of their hair, she bought me a little classical guitar from J.C. Penney's and taught me basic open chords so I could play along too.(I still have that guitar!) I was about 6 at the time. When I was 12, I got my first electric guitar and started taking lessons. It was a baby Les Paul. (I WISH I still had that guitar!) I've been playing off & on ever since. I've gone through periods of years where I don't play, but I've really been getting into it again these past few years...fingering comes pretty naturally for me, but I wish I was better at reading music. I'm actually thinking about taking lessons again at the ripe ol' age of 35!!

My son got into guitar back in Feb of this year. I have always wanted to play guitar as well. Since I was taking my son and daughter (bass) to lessons every week I figured I might as well go too.

I am 42. It's never too late to learn and I enjoy it which is the most important reason of all.

Drugs, I guess. I loved the sound of electric guitar when I would go to my friend's basement where he had a record player, and we would sit and listen to Jeff Beck, Jerry Garcia, Frank Zappa, Carlos Santana, King Crimson, Fleetwood Mac, etc. I loved the sound of electric lead guitar and I had to learn it.

My friend played a lot of guitar, but he mostly played acoustic fingerpicking so he couldn't really teach me what I wanted to learn, I wanted to learn electric lead and rhythm.

So I bought tablature books and tried to learn that way. I learned lead tricks like bending, sliding, hammer-ons, pull-offs, trills and the blues scale.

I didn't start learning music theory until I got off of drugs some 19 years ago tho, I just couldn't study that well while I was using.

Drugs might have helped me in music appreciation, but they didn't help me to play at all. :-/

I like happy endings,

I remember when I was younger I used to go to my friends house and we would roll the biggest spliff in the world, smoke it and listend to floyd, then we would have a jam and record what we were doing and we would come to the conclusion that it was brilliant and we should be famous musos, but when we listend to it the next day it sounded like a complete pile of old bollocks, so it goes to show drugs dont pay, I dont smoke any funny cigs anymore and I am a better person because of it, well done humstrat1 I know where ya comin from.