James Lee Stanley

This past Wednesday, I started taking guitar lessons. I wanted to learn some different scales and chord progressions, chordal relationships and how to write tablature, as many people are always asking me if there is tablature for my guitar work. Sometime in the future, there will be tablature for all of my solo guitar orchestrations.

But the reason I bring it up is, I’ve been playing the guitar since 1960 and never had a formal lesson. Now having had just one, I am sincerely sorry that I didn’t pursue that direction with more fervor.

Yes, I came up in a time when any guitar player would take the time to show you how to do it. And I do know that I always show anyone who asks me how I did something, but I haven’t been in that place where guitar players trade info like we did when I was coming up.

So while I learned all I could, I learned most of it from going to watch people play and getting close to the stage and watching their hands and buying recordings and slowing them down to figure out what notes they were playing, or just playing a song over and over again while I tried to play along.

But last Wednesday, I actually went into a music store, layed down my money and started taking lessons. And I have to tell you, it was thrilling. I’ve been playing all my life and within minutes, Chuck, the teacher, was showing me things I didn’t “not” know, but hadn’t put together quite like that.

When you take lessons from someone else, you are gathering another perspective of the instrument you are trying to master, and don’t be fooled or discouraged, you will never “master” your instrument. All that happens is that the more you play, the more you see where you want to be, as opposed to where you are. So it is a journey that never ends and somehow, it’s not frustrating, it’s beautiful and compelling and that’s why we keep doing it.

After we worked with a simple blues progession and some pentatonic scales over those chords, he wrote out some tablature for me and I forced myself to not use my ears and just play what he played, but look at the tablature, what it represented and then translate that into my fingers on the fretboard.

Then we played the progression a few more times and my half hour was up. It went by like lightning and when I left, I felt like a nine year old kid. I was excited about my instrument, excited about music and most amazingly, there was a tune, that simply erupted in my head as we played, and I had to get home and get it out of me and into the world. And I did.

I wrote a song called, “let’s get out of here” and I can’t stop playing it. It is so very much fun to be this excited about what I do after doing it for almost five decades. I can’t wait til next Wednesday’s lesson.