My First Guitar, and how I broke it!

Many, many years ago (wow so many many’s), one Christmas when I was about 5 or 6 years old, I received my very first guitar. Looking back it was a kids classical guitar with nylon strings. It seemed massive, I think it might have been a 3/4 size and possibly bigger than me. Anyway, I had no idea how to play it (obviously), and did the usual pretend strumming and for some reason was intrigued by knocking on the guitar body and listening to the noise inside which sounded loud and if honest slightly scary to 6 year old me. I tried to play it whichever way I could but like most kids ended up putting it to one side.

when I was 7 years old my mam sent me to piano lessons. We had a piano (passed down through the family from the gran whom had bought it during ww2), and my mam played and my older brother played too. Every week I would go to the classes with my old piano teacher and follow the mighty John W Schaum books. I still had ideas about playing that guitar but it stayed unplayed for so long…..UNTIL fast forward 2 years we got some new neighbours.

These neighbours were students who were renting the house next door. 2 guys who seemed cool and trendy. AND they had a guitar…wow…I would learn I thought. They gave me a book to try and teach myself. The first thing was that some of the strings were broken. Now back then I knew NOTHING about guitar playing, or guitars, or what strings were made of. To me, the strings looked just like fishing line….We had fishing line in our shed I thought. I would use the fishing line on the guitar…what a genius idea!!!

I can’t remember if I decided to restring the whole guitar or if the strings had all snapped, but I decided to put the new strings (fishing line) on the guitar and tighten the strings. Now I think I tried the strings, couldn’t understand the book and got bored, so I decided to see how tight I could get the strings (fishing line). So I tightened, and tightened, and tightened and stopped. What was that noise I could hear? Was it a groaning, or a creaking? And then with a loud CREAK, GROAN NOISE the guitar neck snapped off the guitar, and lay on the floor next to the body. Woah, I wasn’t expecting that at all. So I did what any 9 year old would do, and put it in the shed at the back out of sight. And that was the start of my guitar journey haha. It wasn’t till I was 2 years older that I started properly.

Now, over 40 years l am a guitar teacher and I still remember that guitar, still think about the noise it made, and when I see snapped guitar necks when teaching I think, wow, I remember that!