Guitarists today don’t know they’re born! Not only can you buy pretty good instruments for £100 or so you can get digital effects that are stupidly cheap for what they do and most importantly of all - tuners. What would I have given for something to help me tune the damn thing 30 years ago?!

On top of all that there’s tutorial DVD’s and online stuff. With the
publicity about the Led Zep re-union I dug out my Led Zeppelin songbook I had for Christmas back in the 70’s. Some of the stuff was in tab (written to show where to fret each string etc), some was just in standard lines and dots. Black Dog was not only in lines and dots the guitar part was in the bass clef. If you not familiar with musical notation let me explain the lines indicate the pitch of the note, bottom line E, space F, next line G etc. That’s for the treble clef, for the bass clef there’s still 5 lines but they mean different things - bottom line is G or something. Why is it different? To make life difficult is the only reason I can think of.

Anyway, I struggled for years trying to play the thing as a kid then the other day I thought I’d have another go and see if there was some online tab (huge web sites are devoted to showing tablature diagrams of how to play popular songs). A quick google showed better than that. UTube has a whole raft of people playing it in slow motion. It might not sound as good as Jimmy but at least people can now figure out what it is I’m trying to play!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRpj5VmyS6E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te2U-BO2YYY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSwZeAjghHk&feature=related

So if you’re buying someone a guitar first for Christmas :

a) buy them a tuner / effect unit with built in tuner (it should be illegal to seller starter guitars without a tuner)

b) get them online to find some lessons