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The First Song That I learned On Guitar


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My buddy taught me the melody of Sunshine Of Your Love by Cream. I learned it using single note lines at first, But the first full song I learned using full chords on my Stella guitar was House Of The Rising Sun, The Animals version. This was back in the mid 1960's.

 

Later on when I joined one of my first band efforts I learned Sunshine Of Your Love in full chords and leads to complete my learning of that song.

 

What about y'all? What was the first song on guitar that you learned and played.

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What'd I Say? by Ray Charles. I learned the 1 lick and the 4 lick but nobody showed me the 5 lick so I stopped there.

 

I sort of figured out part of the Bonanza theme too.

 

Then I decided I would learn how to play like me and stared doing "impressions" of styles instead of learning songs.

It was a different world back then. A friend who had taken lessons showed me the E minor pentatonic scale as a pattern from the open 6th string up to the 12th fret on the 1st string.

That was a real game changer, especially when I figured out that I could start on the G and play a pentatonic major scale.

 

Eventually I got a gigantic 2 book collection of all of the recorded Beatles songs with chord tabs and played almost all of that stuff without ever really learning any of it. Mostly because I couldn't sing very well.

 

I don't regret any of it although I might make different choices based on what I know now.

I am still glad I decided to learn how to play like me. I still play like me, people notice that.

 

It took a lot longer to learn how to sing like me but now I do that too. And write songs.

It took a chunk of my life to get here and I am still not sure where "here" is.
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I can"t remember which was first, but it was either The Beatles" 'Blackbird' or Willie Nelson"s 'Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain'.

 

'House of the Rising Sun' and 'Hey Joe' came soon after.

 

But 'Malagueña' and 'Bouree' we"re in the mix as well.

Sturgeon's 2nd Law, a.k.a. Sturgeon's Revelation: âNinety percent of everything is crapâ

 

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http://murphysmusictx.com/

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"House of the Rising Sun", of course. At one point, that pretty much defined a generation of Guitarists. Funny thing, the first song a lot of us learned was in 3/4 time, in a minor key, with an arpeggiated intro. That's quite an introduction . . .

"Monsters are real, and Ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win." Stephen King

 

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For me it had to be some old campfire/cowboy songs from the ED Sales learn to play guitar book. I do remember learning to play bar chords and learned Day Dream Believer using lots of bar chords. First one for a band was Louie Louie. Jim
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  • 2 weeks later...
whatever was in the Mel Bay book.. I do remember it was me strumming "Michael Row The Boat Ashore" but adding in extra chords to jazz it up but then realizing I could play "Cruel To Be Kind" by Nick Lowe with the same chords and fumbling around and figuring it out and then playing and singing it that made my Dad say "hey... you're actually getting good on that thing" and then bring me home an electric guitar and amp a few days later... and I remember figuring out "More Than A Feeling" the same way... but these were just the first position chords, which was where that book stopped, though from playing trumpet I knew scales and single-note things and could pick out solos, I couldn't play songs and have them exactly sound right so I felt like I couldn't play and was begging for lessons, which my Dad tried to provide himself, being a band director, but he didn't know how to play guitar any more beyond what I knew and just made go through beginner reading exercises, which was boring and I could already do... then in a few weeks I started singing in a jr. high garage band and saw the guitarists playing barre chords, and it clicked: "they're using their first finger as the nut!" After that I just sat and played along with the radio and records and it all came together.
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