Hello everyone, welcome to FROSCOM. Today, Dave is gonna tell you about his journey of rediscovering this guitar

due to being stuck at home because of COVID. Thank you, that's a nice introduction. Thank you all for turning out today. Good morning from Texas where I think it's like 21 Celsius here and it's gonna be hotter today. This is a talk on something I kind of rediscovered

during COVID. And for those who don't know me, I'm Dave Stokes, Twitter handles at Stoker. And let's see how this started. I used to travel a whole lot working for Oracle. I used to be MySQL AB

and when we got bought by Sun Microsystems and then we got bought by Oracle Corporation. And I used to be gone certain parts of the year up to two to three weeks a month. And for example, right before COVID shut down

North America, I made platinum on American Airlines. That was two trips over the Atlantic, a whole bunch of trips around North America. And then the second weekend in March, it all stopped. And suddenly everything's like this virtual. And I'm one of those people who fidgets. And one of the things that I do is

when I'm waiting around, there's nothing to do. I pick up one of these and I start playing. Also sometimes when I'm on a, I hate to admit this, when I'm on a conference call and it's something that's not part of what I have to do, I will mute myself and start just doing scales.

But anyway, March, 2020, I was off the road, nothing to do. And so I started looking around for something to do. And a friend of mine mentioned that, well, this is the obligatory COVID bug hitting us.

I'm sure this will be the way our grandchildren will see it portrayed in books. Anyway, I have a couple of guitars, always had guitars around. When I was a kid, I had a little plastic guitar and eventually got a wooden guitar. And I started playing when I was elementary school age. I had some lessons here and there, played off and on, played with friends and classmates.

We're in a couple of rudimentary bands that never went anywhere. Although I had some friends that actually made some minor success. And like I said, I took lessons, which if you're just starting out, I really recommend it because that could keep you going. Thought about a music degree when I was in high school and was really serious about going to college.

And I took a couple of music classes when I was still in high school. And some of the, my folks in my class is saying, hey, it's great. The only trouble is there's not a lot of money there. And that computer stuff you're doing on the other side of the campus is gonna pay a lot better. And the other thing about the music business is that it's mainly a business and music is secondary

and not having a lot of talent, not having a lot of luck. I decided not to pursue that. So I thought it was better to play behind a computer keyboard, which I have been doing now for several decades. And by the way, better hours, less people throwing stuff at you and no one smoking cigarettes

while you're trying to play or sitting there drunk while you're working, at least very rarely. Not a lot of playing after college. After grad school, I got married, had some kids, got houses, moved across country, did a whole bunch of other stuff. And I still had a guitar but didn't really pull it out on a regular basis.

And I noodled every so often. You see the guitar case getting there, sitting there and you kinda get a little, I should play, I should practice. You pick it up, you sound horrible, which kinda makes you wanna put it back right away. So let me get through this. So COVID hits, travel stops.

I'm doing a lot of stuff from home. Even Larry Ellison of Oracle fame said that he hated Zoom meetings cause he was always accessible. There was no time where you sit in an airport lounge or on an airplane and have some time to yourself to think and work or in my case, write books, things like that. So COVID kinda knocked my wheels off.

So what do you do when you're not on the road half of a month? Well, about that time I noticed that the Fender Guitar Company, they're one of the original ones credited rightly or wrongly with inventing the solid body electric guitar, started giving away access to their Fender Play program,

which is a series of lessons, songs, instructions, music theory for free. And I figured, well, why not? And I logged in there not expecting a whole lot and found that it was very, very well organized, especially for beginners. There are some very simplified songs.

There are some things that are much more complex and they do have a rating. And I started playing some stuff. One of the songs I've always tried to get was a Stevie Ray Vaughan song. Actually it's a, oh, can't remember his name now. He's from Chicago. I could picture his face, but it's...

["Stevie Ray Vaughan Song"] Anyway, long story short, his name will pop up in my head in a minute and you'll see me get very surprised. Called Married and Had a Little Lamb. The simplified version was real good and I started playing with that and started picking stuff up. The Fender program has multiple tracks,

pop, country, rock, blues, not a lot of classical there, but it's enough to get you going. And it's extremely well produced. It's probably the best produced lessons out there on the internet. By the way, if you sign up for it, they now started charging and I think it's like 50 bucks a year. You get discounts on shipping,

an order is over 50 bucks and I've used that a few times. Also, they have a contest for a few practice for more than seven minutes a day for four or five days in a row. You're interested in a contest to win a guitar. Anyway, the thing I like about their program is it's very well done. They have audio instructions

with videos that show you how to mix the chords and how to do the strumming patterns and then in tablature, they have the notes you're gonna play. Started noodling with that and started looking around what else is out there. Well, my favorite out there is called Justin Guitar. He's someone from, I believe, New Zealand who moved to England

and has an entire series of 10 years of lessons out there. This guy is the highest rated anecdotally from everyone I've seen on the internet. He's a great instructor. He teaches very well. The stuff that he rushes over in one lesson, he'll cover it in another level, multi-level from beginners to advanced.

It's mostly free. If you want the tablature to the songs, you have to pay $50 a year for that. He has some other stuff out there you can buy like his books. Created structures. Like I said, he has 10 years worth of material out there. So if you have a favorite song or something similar from an artist,

you could go out there and track it down and he'll show you how to play it. It's very well done, almost as well produced as the stuff from Fender and really engaging and he's almost annoyingly positive all the time. So that kind of leads on there.

If you go out to YouTube, there's actually some recordings of him giving lessons to folks to kind of help you judge what you should be doing if you're stuck all by yourself and can't get out to a teacher. He has a wide variety of styles and everything from pop to jazz. So I highly recommend him.

Now, if you go out to YouTube, there's lots of good stuff out there and unfortunately like YouTube, there's lots of very bad stuff out there. There are everything you want out there. If you're into death metal, there's ways to shred, there's ways to do all that. If you're in the country, how to get that Willie Nelson sound.

So the quality production ranges from absolutely horrible to terribly brilliant. Sometimes you'll have to hunt through six or seven lessons on the same song to forgive me, get the information you want.

Now, one of the problems with the guitar is that there are multiple ways to play things. For instance, good old smoke on the water. You can play it.

The difference is I'm playing open notes on one here and fretted notes here because there's so many different ways to play different things. You can actually have multiple people being right on how to play it. Johnny Rivers will play a song different than Chuck Berry did, but they're both fantastic.

So you have to kind of figure out what you can do and what you like and what's easiest for you. So shop around, look around, try everything. Also, great thing about YouTube is that there's a lot of folks who give basics instructions and a good handful of folks

who give very advanced instruction. Paul Davids from the Netherlands gives very great advanced instruction. Unfortunately, unless you're close to his level, some of it will go way over your head. There's other folks out there like Marty Schwartz, who I'll mention a little bit later. He tends to be able to scale it from,

if it's a beginner song, he keeps it at the beginning level. If you have favorite songs, favorite albums or all that, everything's out there. Also, what's very handy is that there's live versions of the various things. So you can actually watch your heroes play their songs. One big thing is that if you're watching someone like Metallica, be advised that some of the things

that you're gonna have to do for yourself, like turn on distortion pedals and all that, they have a guy that they pay to do that. Also, what's interesting out there is there are discussions of the various gears, whether you want a hollow body guitar like this Gretsch, or I have two Telecaster type guitars here

that are solid bodies. There's gear reviews, how to change your strings, how to adjust the guitar, music theory, amplifiers, how to build amplifiers, how to repair amplifiers. You can actually get instructions on how to build your own guitars. It's typical YouTube, it's a mixed bag of stuff.

And if you head around, there's little treasures out there. Now, my YouTube favorites are once again, Justin Guitars, Marty Music or Guitar Jams. They have a lot of little short stuff. A gentleman who you'll have to see on Fender Play named John McClennan, he puts out a short little song just about every day.

It ranges from 70s funk to old country hits to 60s rock. It's always varied. And he's another one of those folks that you find annoyingly happy all the time. Damian Bocce, if you're into rockabilly, he is once again, annoyingly happy all the time,

but he gives very good, very simple lessons on doing rockabilly, which sounds very simple music, but it's very hard to play. A gentleman named Eric Blackman does wonderful lessons. And what I like about his stuff is the way they produce it. You can see the notes that he's playing

in tablature on the screen. He explains very well that he does. He does it just a little bit differently than some other folks. And a lot of the pointers I got for him are amazing. Paul Davids has some great stuff. Week ago, two weeks ago, he put out a thing on an old song called Nobody Loves You When You're Down and Out and he discusses the chords arrangement in that.

And it's one of those things where you start playing it and you find out that it's a very simple, very easy to play chord progression. Starts off with a C, E minor, A7, and then a D minor. Two or three fingers for most of the song

and it flows very nicely, beautiful lessons. So when you're out there on YouTube, please look at these folks. Instagram, Instagram is many of the folks from YouTube that you're used to. And if you're a fan of Queen, Brian May puts out some amazing stuff. It's very short. But the thing about it, it's very brilliant

and you end up spending, I don't know, an hour or two trying to do what he's doing, which of course you can't quite pull off because you're not Brian May. But it's real interesting to go out and look at that. Also on Instagram are many of the big guitar manufacturers and artists and they'll have little clips of what they're doing.

For instance, a friend of my wife from high school son is an up and coming country artist named Randall King and he's always dropping hints of his new songs and presentation material out there. So Instagram is also another great source of information. Okay, guitars. I'm gonna pretend that you've watched this

and suddenly you decided you want a guitar in your hands. Well, you have many choices. You can get a classical guitar. This is a Martin classical guitar from the 1950s. What happened is the gentleman you see holding that guitar had a guitar much like this one,

a hollow body acoustic that got stepped on. And for the past 70 years, he's been playing this guitar. That you may recognize is Willie Nelson. And yes, that is a hole in the guitar. The guitar is officially known as Trigger and he's been playing it all this time.

He gets amazing sounds out of it. Great thing about classical guitars is that they have softer nylon strings, which are a little bit easier on your fingers. The bad part is if you have small hands, the fret board here is rather wide and they usually have heavy thick necks. So if you have long thin fingers, you might like this. If you have soft fingers,

you'll probably want something like that. From there, the choices run the gamut. It also depends on how much you wanna spend. If you are Elon Musk watching this, you can get just about anything you want. Abalone inlay, all sorts of bindings,

special woods that do stuff. Do they play better than a cheaper guitar? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Sometimes this is all cosmetic, doesn't do much. So between say like 10 euros and the national debt of any major country on name, you can spend that on guitar.

If you want, you can get guitars with two necks. And there are all sorts of configurations for that. Led Zeppelin fans will recognize this Gibson ES-1275. Whatever you wanna pay, want, you can do.

If you want, you can make your own. They have, if you're good with woodworking, I wouldn't recommend unless you're not, unless you're good with woodworking. They have acoustic guitar kits. They have electric guitar tickets. They range in ability to build it levels from very simple to very complex. The hardest part you'll probably have is finishing it,

dying the wood and putting a gloss on it. The wiring is fairly simple. If you've ever made a CAT5 or CAT6 cable, you have 90% of the skills that you need there. The only other thing you need to use is a soldering iron. And I realize I'm talking to a lot of software engineers, which means heat and physical pain

are involved if you do this wrong. So be careful there. Okay, if you're a novice, what I recommend you do is if you have a guitar playing buddy, take them to the guitar store with you and go to three or four different guitar stores, if you can, and look for a guitar that's easy to play,

which is called Well Set Up. The strings aren't too high off the fretboard. The back of the neck isn't all scarred up. You can sit down and strum a chord and it sounds good to you. Have the basics of how to do stuff. The staff do that.

If the shop is too busy to do that, make an appointment to come back and talk to a salesperson. You don't wanna be rushed. You wanna get something that you want. Ask to get a couple lessons thrown in for the price. Some shops will do that, some won't. You want something that's comfortable, something that you like, and make sure you buy something that you look at and you go, oh, I gotta go play that.

It's one of those things where if you have an ugly guitar that you don't like, you're not gonna play it. If you have something that you're horrible but it's a pretty guitar, you'll close the door, pull down the shades, and you'll play it. Once again, make sure the guitar is well prepared. The strings aren't high off the fretboard. There's no sharp fret ends

so that it doesn't dig into your fingers. New strings, old strings can get rusty. Embedded oil and cake stuff, they just don't sound right. No rattles or buzzes that aren't explained. Now this guitar, as you can probably hear, there's a little bit of a 60 cycle hum.

That's because I have computer monitors and other stuff plugged in here and some of that does get picked up. Some types of guitars have pickups that normally pick up more frequencies than others. That's an entire talk in itself. But look for something that you like, something that you think is pretty

that you need to go play. Also, when you're trying to play, use a tuner. My favorite is this one. And this one is kinda nice because I could hit a note and it'll tell me

how far off I am and of course I haven't tuned this up. One thing about this type of tuner is I can actually strum across all the strings that will show me when I'm lucky, all the strings, their settings. These range in price from like five euro for a little cheapo ones to pedals that will do it.

That will be in the 80 euro range. Get a tuner, use it frequently. Try to learn how to tune by ear. That helps, but it helps to be able to do that. When you're learning, you're talking about the cowboy chords, C, D, G. Very simple, but learning how to go

from one to the other will take you time. There are certain things you can do to learn how to make that easier. Sometimes you just isolate two fingers and move them back and forth and it'll take time. It's a mechanical skill that you'll have to learn. Second thing that's gonna take some time to learn

are what they call bar chords. The guitar is tuned to an E minor chord and where the strings originate is the start of where the E minor chord is. But if you wanna shift that up, you have to use a finger to pretend to be that piece there called the nut.

So if you're doing more complex chords, you end up having to lock this finger here, which is very hard for a lot of folks because you want almost even pressure across all the strings there. And sometimes when you're starting out, you mute these, you get that, or you mute those.

It takes a little bit of time. Big hint there is don't do it flash. Roll it onto the side a little bit. Also, you can practice five to 20 minutes two to five times a day. It's a lot better than trying to do 30 minutes today, hitting it again for five minutes on Thursday.

What I do is when I'm putting up my stuff in the morning and checking emails, I'll do scales. Something else I recommend that I don't do enough is there's software out there to record you. Your cell phone can record you. There's lots of apps on the phone to help you,

tuners, chord charts, and all that. Play for two minutes, then play it back. Play with your, along with what you played. You've got to develop your ear, and the fastest way to do that is to listen. And if you're just playing and not listening to yourself

or concentrating on your playing, instead of listening to what you're putting out there, it kind of drags your back. Accessories, as I mentioned earlier, here's three types of tuners from expensive to more expensive. This one on the far right is for electric guitars.

These will all work on any sort of guitar as long as they can pick up the vibrations from it. The Fender company has one for the phone that works pretty good. You also want spare strings because they do break, they do wear out, they do get gummy, they do go dead, they notch from where they're pressed on the frets on the fretboard. Pics, that's another area

where there's a wide variety of types. There's some that fit on your thumb. There are some you hold between thumb and forefinger. Some of us don't use them all that often, just go with fingers. It depends on preference.

Sometimes you'll want to go back and forth. Accessories, electric guitars, buy good cables. Cheap cables break real quickly. They have a lot of other problems. You're probably gonna spend between 15 and 30 euro for a good one, the last. Now something else that's out there

is that Wi-Fi has hit guitars. One's a transmitter, one's a receiver. What's great about that is when the dogs are napping and the wife's out of the house, I can plug into this, turn up my amp, and walk around the house playing while I'm doing stuff.

Very handy. These were very cheap off guitaria off of Amazon, and I find them as good as some others that are about 10 times the cost. Also, as you get more electric guitars, there's all sorts of pedals and other accessories.

Pedals that make your notes go wah. Compressors to strengthen the signal. Distortion machines to give more of a fuzzy sound. Ring modulators, synthesizers, all that. If you're a gear nut computer nerd, you're gonna find the guitar world

is pretty much the same. A lot of gear nuts out there. Well, there's my wireless setup. I can't move that. This is a fairly common guitar pedal setup, pedal board down here with a chorus, a flangler,

distortion pedals, volume pedal down here. This is another area where you can run into a lot of money and there's a lot of discussion about what should you put first, what do you put where. If you have loopers that will pay back what you have, you probably want those before the signal. If you're doing a tuner, you might want that at the end.

It depends on what your preferences are. One thing I highly recommend is this little device here. It is called a Fender Mustang. What it is, is it's a little amplifier. It has like 28 different effects

and 18 different amplifiers built into it. Great thing about it is it has Bluetooth. It has a headphone jack. It has, like I said, Wi-Fi capabilities. So the limit is there. It's a great preamp. You can actually take a line out of this and put it into your computer

and record what you're doing with something like Audacity. Very handy, very simple, fits nicely in a guitar case. And I think they're, if you have the Fender membership, I think it's like $90. So other amplifiers you can get,

big noses have been around for about 45 years. They're very simple. They run off batteries. They're handy to take around. You can get a good tone out of it. At one time, supposedly Eric Clapton was gonna have an entire wall of these behind him on stage, but they just couldn't figure out how to sync them all together.

There's classic amplifiers out there that if you go into the history of this, these are basically glorified tube radio. Tube radio is modified to take instrument input. And depending on how nice you want to be to your neighbors and what your bank account looks like, you can go as extreme as you want.

Big problem with stuff like this is you end up with a lot of stuff to carry and that can get rough on your back and rough on your pocketbook, but it's nice. Okay, if you're gonna learn the guitar, one thing I recommend is down at the bottom here, you have tablature, which tell you what fret

to play. I also recommend learning to read the notes. You don't have to be a fast sight reader. You don't have to be a good sight reader,

but it helps to be able to find a melody to a song. There's an old joke in the musician's world. There's a old joke in the musician's world that how do you get a braggy guitar player to shut up, and put a sheet of music in front of him.

Once again, learn the basic chords. These are two simple chords, figuring it however you want to do it. The first one is a C. Second one is a B. Learn the fretboard.

One of the things I used to do all the time was E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, and do that for all the notes. Why? Because you need to be able to know where the notes are. Also, it helps tune your ear, and later on when you're playing a melody, you'll recognize how the notes fall together.

Let me turn that back on. So if you're trying to learn an Eric Clapton song, you know where the notes are. Tip number three, learn songs.

Just not, let me go back and see where the chat, okay. If you're learning, learn songs, not parts of songs.

If you're just doodling and learn little parts of songs, someone asks you to play a song, you can only play the start of Sweet Child of Mine. It doesn't really impress people. Tell yourself that you're going to learn 10 simple songs. Musicians I know call these campfire songs. These are the songs that when you're drinking beer around a campfire, you can pull out the songs

that everyone knows, and you're going to learn them well enough so that you can play them with four or five beers in you and still be able to pull them off. Also add in 10 songs that you really like, your favorites or some songs that you know your friends will really like. And then always have two to five other songs you're working on, like a stretch goal, how to, you hear something like Us and Them

or some other song or something that Jack White plays. How always have a couple songs that you're working on that are better than you are.

Tip number four, you don't have to practice every day.

The idea is you want to be better in three days than you are today. Practice in small sessions. You don't, like I said, you don't have to do every day, but do little sessions daily. Try to tell yourself that you're going to learn song X by Y date, that you're going to know the solo to song Z.

Work on scales that helps tune your ears and get your fingers nimble. And it's okay to miss a day or two. You don't got to travel or you're sick or work is crazy. Fight not to miss three days. Tip number five is have fun.

It's supposed to be enjoyable. I've enjoyed my time off the road and I don't know when it's going to end, but I enjoy my time with the car whether it's five minutes or an hour or an hour and a half try to enjoy it as much you can.

And with that, let me turn this off. And let me go to the chat and let's see what we have in the chat.

Although you can join the video conference using the button below the stream. If you want to write a question in the chat

from our side already. Thank you very much for your talk here today. Well, thank you for having me. We'll wait and see if some questions will come in within the next minute. Okay.

So the folks who are attending this, are you guitar players? Are you looking to be guitar players? Or the title of this three walls?

Okay, well. Looks like nobody has a question. Okay, well, either I did a good job or I bored you all to an early sleep. Okay, thank you a lot and have a nice day everyone.

Thank you. Oh, Marcus is typing, oops, he was. Can I recommend a traveling guitar? Yes, I can. The one I,

lovely wife bought me. Unfortunately, I don't remember the brand. Oh, it's called Anygig. It's light, it's small. It's got a humbucker on there. The only thing about it is that with the tuners down on this end, it's kind of a crazy thing to tune,

but it's handy. It's when I go on a road trip someplace and I'm not flying, putting this in the back of my vehicle and a headphone amp and I can practice in a hotel room and have fun and learn a lot.

Acoustic one, acoustic traveling guitars. I haven't seen one that I really like. There's one that's a little more expensive for me that you literally could take the neck off, turn the neck 80 degrees and fits in a standard backpack. I played a couple of those and they do keep in tune, which is amazing to me,

but I don't remember the brand name for that. Well, thank you, Marcus. By the way, if you have any other questions, I uploaded the slides, I'm at stoker on Twitter.

If you don't just wanna talk guitar stuff, let me know. And hopefully next year for OSCON 2022, we can all be in person and maybe I can bring a traveling guitar and we can all play together.

Thank you and have a good evening.