I have played the guitar since I was fifteen. That is longer than I have been doing most of the things that fill my days now.
The first guitar in our house was not even mine. My parents bought it for my sister: a plain classical guitar from Lidl. She never really took to it. I did the opposite.
Smoke on the Water instead of school
The beginnings looked exactly as you would expect from a fifteen-year-old teaching himself. In other words, Smoke on the Water.
Now and then I told my mum I was feeling unwell and could not go to school. I was not ill at all. I just wanted to stay home and practise. It sounds absurd today, but back then it was genuinely hard to get me away from that guitar. After school I spent pretty much every free moment with it, trying to play whatever had just caught my ear.
Nobody taught me. I did plenty of things wrong, and I probably still do some of them wrong. But I played.
A Stratocaster for 250 złoty
Eventually the classical guitar was not enough, so I bought a new Stratocaster on Allegro, the Polish auction site, for about 250 złoty. It was not a Fender, and not a particularly good guitar either: one fret was dented and a string kept catching on it. Still, you could almost play it properly, and you could certainly learn something on it. It was electric and it looked like the guitars people play at concerts, and at the time that was all I needed.
For my eighteenth birthday I got money. I could have spent it on driving lessons, but I bought an acoustic guitar and an amp for an electric one instead, and in the end I only got my driving licence seven years later. It is hard to say whether I regret it. Maybe a little, because if I faced a similar choice today, I would simply buy the guitar and skip the amp, especially since it did not make much sense paired with an acoustic.
I no longer have either of them anyway. Once I started working, I bought myself better gear, then more, and quite a few guitars have passed through my hands over the years, nearly all of them second-hand. Today I mostly reach for a simple Telecaster from a flea market. But that is another story.
From my room to playing with people
For the first few years the guitar was something just for me. Over time it turned out that playing with others is even more interesting.
There were bands and duos, rehearsals, band contests and local festivals. Once I played for WOŚP, the big annual charity fundraiser in Poland. For many years I played in churches, at weddings, ceremonies and concerts, with a repertoire running from rock and popular music to jazz standards. For one of the duos, Duostrings, I also made the website.
A few times I played background music for diners at Rocker, a fairly well-known club and restaurant on Partyzantów Street in Szczecin. There was also a Women’s Day concert in a community centre, and every so often I play by the sea.
In Germany I played one concert. I had joined a band of complete beginners, showed them how to have fun with music and helped them choose the repertoire. After half a year of regular rehearsals we had material we could take on stage.
So I do not have one stage or one genre I could call my own. And I think that suits me.
Zaduszki
There is one project, though, that I come back to every year. In November I play at Zaduszki Literackie, a series of seven or eight concerts in churches and community centres. A few evenings, different places, and a slightly different audience every time.
It has become a fixed part of my calendar. For me, November means Zaduszki.
I play the way I play
There is no music school behind me. I am not a professional guitarist and I am not really trying to become one. What all these years have taught me is what I like most about playing: the moment when I stop wondering what exactly I ought to play.
First you learn ready-made patterns: chords, scales, licks. Then you start to understand why they work. And after a while you take a few familiar things, combine them differently and end up with something of your own. Not always perfect, but your own. It is very much the same for me with building websites and apps.
These days I have more instruments at home than I need. Besides the guitars there is a keyboard, and even a tenor saxophone that I bought by mistake instead of an alto, but I write about those in a separate post.
The guitar stayed, though. Sometimes I play a concert, sometimes a wedding, sometimes several November evenings in a row. And sometimes I simply sit at home with the Telecaster. Now and then my better half feels like listening too, and then I play not just for myself but for her as well, anything from Roxette and Sting to Anna Maria Jopek.
I play the way I play. But after almost twenty years I still want to pick up the guitar, and I think that is what matters most.