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So when I started playing guitar in high school (it seemed to take so long to convince my parents that I really wasn’t that excited by the piano, which maybe doesn’t reflect well on me, that I wasn’t excited, not that it took so long. Anyway, I was poor but at some point they dropped $500 on a stratocaster, god or somebody bless them) I quickly realized that I was essentially tone deaf. I couldn’t tune the fucker and I could never figure out what my favorite rock and roll people were doing with their guitars on the recordings I wanted to ape. Fortunately, my friend Rick had the ear. He could listen to a chord, even a heavily distorted one (for this was the nature of the music we liked), pick up a guitar, and string by string figure out its components. Amazing. (more…)