... so don't beat yourself up Geacher, old mate. In the latter years of my motorcycling I did more looking at my bike than riding it - (a customised Triumph Speed Triple as you asked). It was a lovely thing and when, inevitably, I had to sell it, it felt like my right arm was being torn from my body.

I saw an episode of Grand Designs once where the 'bloke with too much money' mounted a Ducati 916 on his lounge room wall - just to look at - a crime to some, I should think.

i want a telecaster ... i can't afford one, but if i could i would

If so then who cares? Worth the money if that's the case.

Never learned how to play it, it looked good though, oh well in another life...

Happy birthday! Enjoy your new toy and I hope it brings you much pleasure. Keep practising!

A beautiful guitar is a work of art. You don't have to be able to play a musical instrument to appreciate how it looks.

I've spent 6 months intermittently learning the chords to "amazing grace" at the ripe old age of 35. The glw bought me my own guitar book for Christmas and have since doubled my repertoire by learning notes e, f & g which I can almost link together if I really concentrate. At the current rate of progress and musical talent by the time I hit 40 I might have achieved my aspiration of being able to play "wonder wall". Therefore you are certainly not sad as I have often thought of getting another guitar despite having little musical ability - although when I mention it I get an indulgent look from mrs c ( she is a bit of a musician yet another reason I worship her) . There are certainly more harmful ways of chucking your cash about. If you are sad we will be sad together!

Teach yourself - and exclusively devote your spare time to - an e shaped barre chord.

Put your first finger across all the strings - its hard to do at first but on an electric should be a bit easier - hold it down hard. Next place your second finger on the next fret on the third string from the bottom. Next place your third and fourth fingers on the fourth and fifth strings on the next fret.

Move it around.

You are now able to play about 90% of every rock and pop song ever.

Enjoy!

I also have zero musical ability which I apply to an acoustic guitar, electric bass guitar, ukulele and Yamaha keyboard. Fortunately all were cheap.

I produce no music from any of them, but I find the noise very satisfying sometimes.

If you have the right sort of hands - long fingers mostly - you can use your thumb to cover the sixth string and play an F chord for the rest.

Whatever you do, do not listen to guitar teachers. They're trying to make you segovia when being a Ramone is enough for most of us.

Honestly, basic guitar is possibly as easy as an instrument can be. Forget open chords and picking. Ignore folk guitar. Luckily, most of our musical heroes cant play it either so their work is quite reproducible by most of us. Another tip - use distortion. It covers up incompetence in a way that acoustic guitars don't. Korg do a brilliant wee amp for about £60 which has an excellent amp emulator on it which will make you sound like a Ramone brother in no time.

Let me know how you get on.

feckin' gorgeous.
All in their stands, shinely sparkling, one spectrum... no sorry, plectrum, between them.
by fuck they look good, sitting in front of several and many racks of
CDs... to any casual visitor it states "Here abides a muso".
Aye, right....

thanks for the advice.
will post updates as necessary.
now here we go...
Now where ARE the chords to smoke on the water?

See,thats where you're going wrong. Its easy for a guitar player but you are not a guitar player. Know your limits my friend. Using the Goatboy method you'll never be able to play that.

You'll be able to play Smells Like Teen Spirit in about 5 minutes tho.

Purely because I'd dreamt the night before that I'd bought a trumpet.
So when I woke up, I bought a trumpet. I like dragging the noumenal into the phenomenal, see. Can I play it? Not at all.

chunkachungchungchungkachungchungshung is easier than brangbrangbrang brangbrangdebrang?
You sure?

or how's aboot the next time yur doon ma way, I introduce you tae Big Tam (see below). I'll be goin fur a wee beer wae him ramorra and I'll ask him if he'll give you a lesson or two.

I too am a frustrated musician. It's drums with me, probably mainly because Tam, my dear departed brother was a drummer but also because of Buddy Rich, Gene Kruppa, Sonny Payne, Stix Hooper, Billy Cobham (Ah, Kelvin Hall 18/06/73 - 75 pence to see John McLaughlan's wee combo)and Keith Moon. However, My dear friend Sandy Jones - a very fine guitarist himself and who engineered the wee tune below - thought it better that I start off smaller. As I write, the Hohner moothie (GLH - Great Little Harp) and 'How To Play Pocket Harmonica' book that he gave me are sitting on the coffee table where they have sat furra wheen o' years. I do sometimes 'accompany' something on the music machine and do occasionally get in the groove. I did get to page 17 once or twice and had a good go at Frere Jacque.

Anyway, G53, huv a great birthday (you're still the oldest!). And, hey Massive, G53 is truly 'The Californian'.

...since the moment, aged 13, that I found a musical instruments catalogue lying around at school. It was almost literally like finding a porno. I studied it in secret and told nobody.

About a year later I went into Aroundabout Sound in Cheltenham with £250 taken illicitly from my life savings (it represented perhaps 90% of them) and bought a Maison bass guitar. A horrible, ugly thing, it was. Great long top horn, tiny headstock, in white with a grey burst that looked like a slug had thrown its coming of age party on the body, invited all its mates and they'd all got arseholed and shat on it. It was a pointy metal bass for playing pointy metal on.

I LOVED it. I thought it looked cool as hell. I bought it not because of how it played, how it felt, its balance - I knew the square root of nothing about any of those things. I bought it because I thought it was lovely.

(Incidentally, I plumped for bass because I was a cellist and I had vaguely formed notions that the strings might be the same. They're not. I switched to guitar when I was about eighteen.)

Although I can play, my love of the sheer look of a guitar has driven me to madness over the years. I've owned something in the order of twenty at this point (I'm 33 and have been in love with the guitar for twenty years). I've bought Les Pauls because they're beautiful. I've bought SGs because they're beautiful. I've bought Jazz Basses, Strats, Teles, Danelectros, old Silvertone Mosrite ripoffs, Epiphones. All because they were beautiful. I own almost none of them now: five guitars still live with me.

Then I discovered the wonder of the offset waist. I won't bore you with what that means in full (in short, it's an asymmetrical body). Since then, nothing has satisfied like the Fender Jazzmaster and Jaguar, but I can't pretend that about 80% of my love of offsets isn't about how they look.

So no, Geach. It's not sad. You just have eyes and a working aesthetic sense. Guitars are beautiful.

Sorry. Enthusigasm ends.

bit sad, makes perfect sense to me. A guitar can be a beautiful thing to look at, if nothing else. I don't own a musical instrument & never have (the neighbours would probably complain), but I do have a lovely Gray Nicholls cricket bat and I'm no Ian Bell.

but you've put me in guitar mode now. Here's my fave JH tune played by Kirk Lorange, a neighbour of my mate John who lives on Tamborine Mountain near Brisbane. Kirk also provides guitar lessons on his website. Just google him.

You want sad? I've got a pink guitar that cost me 50 quid off e-bay and I play del Amitri tunes on it that I find on UltimateGuitar.com, to myself, in my bedroom, as long as they don't deviate from chung, chung-a-chung rhythms and include G, C, D, AM and EM, that my friend is sad.

...the SONGS are sad, not you.

Ive posted many times of my love for guitars. I currently have around 14 and love 'em all. Having a few guitars around just makes the world a better place!

As for not playing them, give it some bottleneck. As follows:

Open tune the guitar to open D - low to high DADF#AD
Put a glass bottleneck on your middle finger
Rest your index finger lightly on the strings behind the bottleneck
Whack the open strings.
Slide to directly above the 3rd, 5th, 7th or 12th frets. Mostly hit top 3 or 4 strings
Distortion good too. (Goat Face is right here)
Repeat. Sounds brilliant.
Listen to lots of Elmore James.

Surely you mean 49? You're only a couple of years older than me.

But good luck with the guitar - I went to see Clapton on NYE. It doesn't look that hard.

Stick loads of delay and reverb on it, hey presto...Eno-esque soundscapes.
Thats my advice.

Legendarily, Charlie Watts collects coach built cars from the 1930s. He doesn't drive.

Found my dad's old guitar up there. I used to play, a bit, in my teens. I'm going to start from scratch though, with the various tips on here, and start again.

Also, I found a mandolin. Don't know where to start, but I intend to learn that too. Hooray!

As we're on guitars, does anyone have any thoughts on those gizmos for connecting them to iPads?

I can't actually play but do enjoy pottering about.

Just the sight of one of those makes my heart beat faster.

They never used to stay in tune properly though. Anybody know if that's still a problem? I think I want one again.

I recieved a bass for my fourteenth birthday, because I wanted to be in a band (and I thought it'd be easier to get into one if I had an instrument fewer people played). This never materialised, but I still tried to learn it. In fact, I spent weeks poring over the 'How To Play Bass' books I purchased, 'perfecting' different styles and techniques. I learnt to play the 'Jailbreaker' riff, even though I'd never heard the song.

A few months later, I discovered something. It's common knowlege that the bass guitar is tuned GDAE. However, I'd spent my entire musical career learning to play the bass 'upside down', and because I didn't really know what I was supposed to be playing, I didn't twig until I tried to play 'Day Tripper' one day.

I think I gave up soon after and took the small step to acoustic guitar. I've never learnt scales, or riffs much and all I tend to do is strum along to whatever takes my fancy on ultimate-guitar.com. Pop songs are easy enough, because they dont have many chords in them; but ask me to play something from memory and I wouldnt be able to. At the earliest stages I used to write my own songs simply so I could play some songs.

I bought a 'looksabitlikeaRickenbacker' electric too, I rarely use it.

but I persevere.

I still get a feeling of a major achievement when I manage to successfully change strings, as I has to do earlier this evening.

I got myself a Spanish guitar from the Embassy catalogue , with the cigarette coupons I saved up - never learnt to play it though!
I gave it to my cousin in the end.

about that as far as I'm concerned.

Even though I do play my guitars every day I do sometimes find myself just staring at my Telecaster. I think it's beautiful.

My dream is to own an original fifties model.