I just got home from my first ever IGC Camp 2017, and despite being severely sleep deprived, before I finally went to bed I unpacked and JOINED TG as a 6 month member! Words are not adequate to convey the extrordinary camp experience I just had but as a first time camper, I felt welcomed into this family immediately, and the warm supportive environment made it really easy to be just brave enough to give the open mic another chance...
I highly recommend everyone to go off to camp at least once, just so you see what you've been missing. And you will slap yourself for waiting so long to do it, ha!!
OK, sorry this is supposed to be an intro post since I am a brand newbie TG member:
I am Carol M from upstate NY. I started playing guitar in 7th grade on a second hand Harmony guitar. Took lessons for a year or so, we went thru the "Mel Bay" guitar method workbooks... I never made it all the way thru the green one (level2), and by then it was high school and college and all those grown up things that crowd out all the fun things that kids like to do. So that guitar stayed in the closet gathering layers of dust and rusting its poor strings in its lonely dark decay... and the decades kept their insideous march thru my guitarless life. Crying yet?
I need to team up with Lynn and write some blues lyrics to cheer everyone up. Sorry it gets better now.
So Summer of 2013 my neice started getting interested in guitar. She hauled a poor old bedragled guitar with one string missing out of the basement and was trying to play it. I tried to tune it up for her cuz it sounded so pathetic, and just having a guitar in my arms again woke up the sleeping guitar player in my soul. So when I got home I rescued my old guitar from banishment in the back corner of the closet, tuned it up and started playing again, after 35 YEARS of nothing. As soon as I put new strings on, that guitar suffered a spontaneous broken neck. Maybe its way of telling me it would be OK to go shopping for a new one. So I had no idea how to shop for a guitar and just did what anyone would do, I asked Google to help me. So in the avalanche of cyber information, I discovered all things guitars online. Youtube lessons included. And there was Neil, with a free full length lesson of a song I tried to learn on my own somewhere in the 70's, from a reel to reel tape recorded off the radio of Scarborough Fair. Failed miserably and you can bet that song did not appear in Mel Bay. So I must have watched Neil's video about 200 times but I learned it!!! I grew my fretting callouses on this very song and I have been following the talents of this wonderful teacher and his team on YouTube and on the free features of the TG site. And when my good buddy Vic invited me to come to IGC 2017 I jumped right on it and so very glad I did! It was a joy to finally meet everyone in person and play like kids for a week, with no regard to outside life!! You all rock, and thank you for welcoming me into this wonderful community! You are all so talented and inspirational.
Ok that is my story. I am now going to explore this fantastic website like a kid in the candystore.
Thanks for reading such a long post
Carol
