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Speedo

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We have one for every other topic why not this?!

I just realized when I was posting in the JEW topic that seeing Blink play with the Pop Disaster Tour was what started me on my music path. That night after the show I went home and grabbed my mom's old beat up acoustic and taught myself how to play a shitty, out of tune versions of the smoke on the water riff. Fun fact, I did it with one of Tom's picks that he threw into the crowd. It was just laying on the floor of the pit, no one had grabbed it. I have no idea what happened to that pick.

A few weeks after that I got a shitty Squire Strat and practice amp at guitar center and learned dammit. So, oddly enough, I can pinpoint the exact moment I started playing guitar ... May 10th 2002, it was a little before midnight, I was 15.

What started you guys?

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6 hours ago, Speedo said:

We have one for every other topic why not this?!

I just realized when I was posting in the JEW topic that seeing Blink play with the Pop Disaster Tour was what started me on my music path. That night after the show I went home and grabbed my mom's old beat up acoustic and taught myself how to play a shitty, out of tune versions of the smoke on the water riff. Fun fact, I did it with one of Tom's picks that he threw into the crowd. It was just laying on the floor of the pit, no one had grabbed it. I have no idea what happened to that pick.

A few weeks after that I got a shitty Squire Strat and practice amp at guitar center and learned dammit. So, oddly enough, I can pinpoint the exact moment I started playing guitar ... May 10th 2002, it was a little before midnight, I was 15.

What started you guys?

My dad. 

My dad plays acoustic, was in a band himself when he was a kid - just kids messing about, nothing came of it. he never focused on music but he was always a big fan and he'd play guitar when I was a kid, occasionally he'd play Alice Cooper (specifically Only Women Bleed and Stephen) as well as House Of The Rising Sun by The Animals, a few by The Eagles and some by Dr Hook. My mum would sing along to some of them. When I was about 9 or 10, my sister begged my dad to teach her guitar (she was like 13) and he relented, bought her a cheap electric, and proceeded to give her lessons. I kept going "I wanna learn too!" (I had just gotten into blink) and my dad was like "no no, you just want to because your sisters doing it, if you're still interested in a few years maybe we'll look at it" but I kept nagging, so he'd show me a chord to shut me up, and then focus on my sister.

After a few weeks of this, my sister got bored of guitar and stopped, and I picked up the guitar took it to my dad and said "Look I wrote a song!" that song was called something fucking stupid like 'Hitlers Shoes' because even at my very beginnings my songs were weird, and my parents were both really surprised.  

After that, my dad taught me a few more chords and I kept writing but he didn't exactly understand tab or really know much about progressions or riffs or anything like that so I mostly taught myself. I'd had some lessons in school but they weren't all that helpful, I mostly did it myself with books and the internet and the rest is history. 

I wrote like a million songs in my early teens, some which I still remember to this day (but don't play because...well their kinda lame) and whilst my lyrical songwriting has improved and my guitar work has improved my actual songwriting itself hasn't changed too much - just expands. whenever I've had professionals comment on my work making suggestions to make said songs more 'commercially viable' I've usually taken issue with it. You can call it precious, or arrogance, but ultimately songwriting is a very personal experience, it's letting your soul bare in ways you just can't do with words or direct human interaction and I could never get past that to make something more 'sell-able'.

Songwriting is like the best thing I've discovered in my life, and I'm constantly thankful that I was an annoying brat to my dad. who knows who I'd be if I hadn't. 

 

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i started taking drum lessons when i was 5 until i was 16. I got heavily into blink when i was 14 and i just had to start to play the guitar. i started writing some songs with my friend after i begged him to learn to play the guitar too and that's how my first band was founded. we went on for 6 years i think and then split up because we all moved to different cities.

i kept on playing with the drummer and we started writing and touring as a two piece until we got a bassist later on. We were all about leaving the pop-punk thing behind and doing wieird different shit. a couple years later we dialed it quite back into the rock territory and it's now somewhere in between. after the first album i started writing new songs right away  and thought it was going great and that we were going to be ready to record this year. but i got heavily depressed and wasn't able to touch my guitar and had to take a break from music.

we started rehearsing again about a month ago and it feels great. We're going to record one of my favorite songs ever next week and I'm pumped. even though I'm a bit scared if i'll making it through without panicking and ruining the experience for everyone.

I'd love to go into album mode next year but i think i need to take things slowly or i will end up in the same mess as before....

 

are you in a band right now @Speedo ?

how is your EP doing @Kay ?

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42 minutes ago, NealMcBealTheNavySeal said:

how is your EP doing @Kay ?

It's dead in a ditch mate lol 

I don't have the self discipline or time money or energy to push it where it could go, whenever I try and find ways and means of doing so I get closed doors everywhere. there's basically nowhere to solo gig in this country either. When it comes to my solo stuff I've essentially just stopped caring because I can't get an audience from footfall, and it's very difficult to get it online without a boatload of money (although I'm on a local radio show in two weeks, I'll pretend to sound more optimistic on that).

I bought a house this year so that's been a large amount of my focus - I have a dedicated space for music in the house now but it's still full of moving boxes because there's some work needing done. my intention, when I'm able to have it back as a useable space, is to start doing regular youtube videos of covers and originals, and see how that goes - whilst practising home recording a lot more so I can just record things as and when I want to and throw singles up on Spotify. 

I'm in a new band though, we've been working on material for a lot of this year and we're hoping to record a single and get some decent live tracking recordings to push to venues and such in the new year. I think there's a lot more opportunity for bands then solo acts around here and I get to jump about like a prat on my electric and that's fun so we'll see how that goes. 

 

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There are a lot of musicians in my family and my parents signed me up for piano when i was 5. It was okay. when i was around 10 i wanted to learn blink songs and borrowed an amp and a guitar from a friend and taught myself how to play them. Then i signed up for lessons and studied piano and guitar until i was around 15. I quit, because i dont like to play songs i “have to” learn and dont really care for. 

Started a band the same day i borrowed the guitar, we wrote songs and gigged for 7 years and recorded an album, then started another band, another album. Now we’ve decided to pick up where we left off and we’re finishing an EP and will have some sort of a release gig next year. 

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Music has always been around my Dad's side of the family. When I was like 12, I wanted to be a movie director. But I had problems with school, depression and anxiety when going through my early teens, to the point I was kicked out by 14. I just lost all hope in wanting to be this movie director. But music was always in my head since I was about 6-7. Used to listen to CD's of blink and Linkin Park. They were my two favourite bands as a kid and it clearly shows in my music.

My Dad is a drummer and he had these two guitars. I picked up one of them but found it difficult to play chords. So I learnt how to read tab sheet music for the bass guitar and just replicated them on an actual guitar. Bass lines but on a guitar whilst I had no bass yet. Then when my parents bought me a bass guitar, I was learning all the blink shit. Feeling This, Valkyrie Missile from AVA. I loved playing power chords on the bass.

I just literally played to blink related stuff only. Didn't care for anything else. My cousin was a guitarist and a big blink fan, so obviously it was natural for us to play together whenever we were hanging out. Again, it was just blink stuff. But then we started coming up with our own stuff. Literally ripping off blink pretty much. Within the next few years, I just slowly got better and better at guitar. Still cannot play proper chords to save my life, so I rely more on power chords and songwriting ability.

My cousin and me ended up going different ways as we reached our late teens. He was going to college then to another town/city, whereas I was slowly regaining the confidence I had as a pre-teen. But music was my outlet. I started copying the exact ideas I had in my head, which was learnt by learning how to play blink songs by ear. My music taste changed. I got more and more into punk rock and less and less into pop punk. NOFX and Rancid were other bands I loved listening to. I got more into 80's shit like the Cure too. My songwriting at the time was showing it. Then I got more and more into bands like Refused as well as artists like Kanye West. The Naked + Famous became an influence also.

My songs sound like all my influences in one. My music taste changes every 2-3 years yet remains the same. I just add to it rather than completely ignore what I liked from before. For the past 3 years, I've been recording an album at my own pace. Learning how to use Pro Tools whilst writing the album, so it isn't exactly perfect. Although most people think it sounds so professional. I've got about 4-5 more songs left to finish, then I'm done. I just don't exactly know what to do with the promotion side of shit. I'm not the biggest user of social media either. I post one or two photos on it a year.

As for the album, it's pretty dark and bleak. My stuff always will be. It's my outlet. Just weird that to most people I'm a happy and upbeat person but the album would have you believe otherwise. It's because I daren't talk about shit like that. Music is my outlet. Writing songs is the only way I feel I can express myself. At the uni I'm at, a lot of the tutors view me as a very average guitarist and singer but a great songwriter. A lot of them also wanna see me reach my potential too. Usually I just downplay it. I just write what I wanna write and don't give a flying fuck about what people think of it either.

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3 hours ago, NealMcBealTheNavySeal said:

are you in a band right now @Speedo ?

Not anything active, no.

I quit doing band stuff, like shows and mingling and merch, a long time ago.

Now, I just write for the sake of writing and record because I enjoy it. I don't ever do anything with any of it.

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When i was 7 show The Julekalender went on tv here. I remember the elves from the show playing instruments so I wanted to play the guitar myself, so I got a guitar for children for Christmas that year and I started taking lessons and I thought it was awful, so I wanted to play drums instead (I had already wanted to be a drummer, I got this box of Cadburry's Roses that I liked beating on and drumming on it became my instruments), but I realized taking drum lessons sucked too.

For most of my early years I was a one trick pony. I liked writing xmas tunes, I used to re-write old xmas tunes and I did this every year and me and a friend of mine re-wrote them together and went caroling with our re--written tune. We also tried to write the most fucked up tunes ourselves. I think we were about ten the year we got banned for caroling because of our lyrical content. I had recently learned what necrophilia was and I told my friend about it and he was like "we have to write a christmas song about necrophilia!" and we did, it was about a necrophiliac that robbed graves and fucked corpses when everyone else had christmas dinners. We also wrote a song about robbing Santa and another about helping out the poor and drug addicts. We had plans of making a christmas album. We also expanded our repertoire with non holiday numbers. I wrote a rap about Manchester United, we wrote a song about Winnie the Pooh, we wrote a rap song about breakdancing and hookers and a song about holidays that would make us get off school, and we also made parodies of the popular songs at the time from Westlife and N*Sync and Jennifer Lopez. My best tunes was a boyband parody I wrote about having a girlfriend just because her grandma had great candy. I wrote the melody myself, but it sounded like a Disney song.

 

I couldn't stand was on the radio at the time (this was around 2000) and I wanted to write something better myself. Then I heard the Beatles and was sort of blown away by their songs and I wanted to write songs like they did. Me and my friend wrote a mash up of Jennifer Lopez and the Beatles and he showed me this song called "What¨s My Age Again?" that I thought was really cool and I'd always be super joyed when that song came on the radio. We wrote our songs with my guitar and my cadburrys roses box and we took turns playing the instruments and none of us could play any of them. We made a cassette with our best tunes and it's hilarious and embarrassing. Right after that I think he realized our songs were embarrassing and childish and didn't want to anymore, another part of my life when I realized stuff that mattered to me was childish to other people. I then decided to go solo and used the same recording technique for my new songs, this was the time I only listened to Blink basically and I also decided to take up gutar lessons and my uncle taught me how to play guitar, but I was never any good. I still wanted to do that christmas album, I think all the lyrics had disappeared by then. It probably bummed me out a bit. I think I pretty much gave up on recording music and just wrote a lot of songs the following year and when Blink's smiley album came out it inspired me to start recording the songs I had written when I was 13 and I now semi-knew how to play the guitar too, so I had greater expectations from my last one that I was very embarrassed about. In many ways, the next recording turned out even worse.

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My mom started both me and my brother on guitar.

She used to sing us "Streets of London" by Ralph McTell every night before bed.

My brother is much more talented than me, he dedicated his life to music and won a case against a Dutch band earlier this year. They stole one of his songs and tried to pass it off as their own.

I wanted to be different as a kid so I played Bass, finally bought myself an acoustic when I turned 18 and play sporadically, do the occasional open mic night.

My son hates it when I put the guitar away now throws a proper strop, it's hilarious. I really think and hope he will be musical, but I won't push it on him. 

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3 minutes ago, Bucko said:

My mom started both me and my brother on guitar.

She used to sing us "Streets of London" by Ralph McTell every night before bed.

My brother is much more talented than me, he dedicated his life to music and won a case against a Dutch band earlier this year. They stole one of his songs and tried to pass it off as their own.

I wanted to be different as a kid so I played Bass, finally bought myself an acoustic when I turned 18 and play sporadically, do the occasional open mic night.

My son hates it when I put the guitar away now throws a proper strop, it's hilarious. I really think and hope he will be musical, but I won't push it on him. 

oh my heart, don't, I'll start crying immediately haha - amazing song, my mother used to sing that to us too. 

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22 hours ago, Kay said:

It's dead in a ditch mate lol 

I don't have the self discipline or time money or energy to push it where it could go, whenever I try and find ways and means of doing so I get closed doors everywhere. there's basically nowhere to solo gig in this country either. When it comes to my solo stuff I've essentially just stopped caring because I can't get an audience from footfall, and it's very difficult to get it online without a boatload of money (although I'm on a local radio show in two weeks, I'll pretend to sound more optimistic on that).

I bought a house this year so that's been a large amount of my focus - I have a dedicated space for music in the house now but it's still full of moving boxes because there's some work needing done. my intention, when I'm able to have it back as a useable space, is to start doing regular youtube videos of covers and originals, and see how that goes - whilst practising home recording a lot more so I can just record things as and when I want to and throw singles up on Spotify. 

I'm in a new band though, we've been working on material for a lot of this year and we're hoping to record a single and get some decent live tracking recordings to push to venues and such in the new year. I think there's a lot more opportunity for bands then solo acts around here and I get to jump about like a prat on my electric and that's fun so we'll see how that goes. 

 

oh i so get this. it's so hard to get people to listen and get the ball rolling. you need a popular record to get good live gigs, but you need to play good live gigs to make your record popular.

it's so. much. work.

hope the radio show goes well. it's definately the best thing to just enjoy the part of it you're in control of and not get worked up about the industry.. i really digged your EP

congrats on the band thing. are you writing songs there too?

 

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38 minutes ago, NealMcBealTheNavySeal said:

oh i so get this. it's so hard to get people to listen and get the ball rolling. you need a popular record to get good live gigs, but you need to play good live gigs to make your record popular.

it's so. much. work.

hope the radio show goes well. it's definately the best thing to just enjoy the part of it you're in control of and not get worked up about the industry.. i really digged your EP

congrats on the band thing. are you writing songs there too?

 

Writing and singing, yes. got a great drummer and a very eager bassist so I'm looking forward to getting out there with them, I've played with the drummer for years as he was in my old band, the bassist has never gigged before so he's a bit more of a wildcard - but he's enthusiastic and that is surprisingly more important than I've ever realised, he keeps us keyed up for it and in some ways makes us work harder. it's nice. 

It is the worst catch 22 though - I'm glad you liked the EP! Have you posted your stuff on here before? I'm not sure I've seen it, I'd like to give it a spin. 

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sounds cool! enthusiasm is everything. i'd rather be in a band with guys that suck at their instruments than pro's who don't really care....

i don't think i have, mostly because i don't have anything pro recorded that's not old. however this is the song we're going to record next sunday in manchester.

This is just a demo, but i'm really excited to hear the pro version.

http://polyphone.bandcamp.com

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I think Dammit made me get a guitar because Tom was that cool playing guitar on the TV. Learned When I Come Around and Brain Stew first with a teacher.  Then just started learning from tabs.  I had a friend from Turkey who was legit playing Lamb of God, Mastadon riffs in the 7th grade.  It was enough to push me to become decent.

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  • 1 month later...

I recorded an album when i was 15. I never released it but about a month a ago i said fuck it and im in the process of putting it on spotify. It was yeeeears since i listened to it and im actually pretty proud of it. 

It made me pick up the guitar again after 3 years since playing. Been kind of writing songs and i want to start something, some project. Just me and what i write. I was in a band for ten years almost and it was a team effort but i think just my songs would be different. I dont know. /vent

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  • 1 month later...

Great threat, i started playing guitar at 14, around 2004, i discovered blink trough 2001 the first time i heard Rock Show i tought they were so fun and catchy, i dreamed to play in a band, got my first guitar at 14 and started playing alone, then had a teacher for a few months, first song i learned was Wake me up when september ends, then blink, Green Day, Offspring´s stuff.

Even though i started playing guitar i always related more with the bass, at 21 got my first bass and it was natural to me, i´ve been in three bands during 8 eight years, and have recorded in one of them, i hope to record more with all the projects.

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