Hi,

I'm back again. Really like the new site  - lots of work gone into this and lots of sleep lost to do it I'll guess.

Enjoyed the old site and found it very helpful with theory, progressions and licks , excellent lessons and the most wonderful supportive community. This appears to provide an even better online environment.

Lots of you would have read my introduction last time and I haven't changed much except got older.

I'm a 64 year old from Northumberland UK who has been trying to learn guitar for about 50 years. I don't get on too quickly as I have a computing job that takes up lots of my time, and responsibilties at home that account for a lot of the time left.

Musically I have a wide range of likes and influences covering all varieties of music - but I love guitar music, especially the old blues men like Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, folk blues like Davy Graham, Frank Zappa, Django Reinhardt a long list.

I'm afraid I'm not a very good student as I tend to just dip into the lessons and glean stuff - especially some of the theory lessons. Also I find it really difficult to use a pick, now as I have arthritis in my thumbs but previously as I've almost always played fingerstyle(apart from when I was briefly in a band in the early 80's, when we wrote all our own stuff and played a few gigs in decent sized places as well as lots of very small venues).

I've currently got quite a few guitars mostly I play a 1965 Epiphone Olympic special that I've had since 1980. It only has one p90 pickup but its just a lovely thing to play.  Fender Jaguar HH Classic player, Reverend Sensei,  Faith Venus, L'arrivee P03, Guild M20 - and a few more oddments stashed away. Got a Vox AC30 from about 1980 that I haven't used for a while as it shakes the walls too much, a Blackstar HT-5R, VOX A5, Boss ME-80, a Vox WahWah, and some kind of clean boost thing by Mooer. for recording I have a Zoom Q4, a Focusrite Scarlett 18i8, a couple of microphones and a whole bunch of windows computers.

More recently some friends who had a band in the early 70s when they were at school decided they wanted to get together and play again but as one of the guitar players(who was hugely talented)  unfortunately died a few years ago they have me to replace him - I'm not hugely talented but we're all friends:-). So for more than a  year we've been getting together and jamming and have decided to actually play a gig  in about a months time.  I think the last time I played a first gig I broke a string first song and it just went downhill from then on.

We don't play lots of blues as we have an accordion player who's younger than we are and has threatened to tell people we've kidnapped her and are making her play old mens music 🙂

Hope you all enjoy playing music as much as we do.