My Mum taught piano so my first 'musical' experiences came from the dreaded 4pm daily lessons for myself and my sister. I really wish I'd concentrated more. Got my first guitar when I was 12 and since then have never been without one, I currently have five ... classical, jumbo, 2 electrics and a bass. I did have a banjo and a violin once but neither survived my tendency to want to take things apart to see how they worked. My first public performance on anything was on a tea chest bass in a pub on the Norfolk coast in 1963. Some band work followed on lead guitar in the same year, then I went to bass for a bit when back in London. Interest in 'the blues' added a harmonica collection. Later came a couple of MIDI keyboards and my own piano. More recently a trumpet, clarinet and alto sax have been added to the instrument list. I've so far failed to get anything remotely musical out of the first two. With sax I can honk out bits of a very small number of tunes but really don't think I'm sufficiently focussed to be any better than that. Although its not an 'instrument' as such, I get my biggest buzz out of my multi-track recorder because it allows me, with my limited musical capability, to lay down (say) a bass track, add some guitar parts, a simple keyboard riff, blues harp, percussion, vocals and vocal harmony, even some crowd noise if I want to make the result sound like a 'live' performance. There's a couple of my early efforts, from when I first got the multi-tracker, at ...
http://www.soundclick.com/rojalesbluesband ... if anyone's remotely interested. Its all 'smoke and mirrors' of course but the closest I'm going to get to playing with anyone else these days!
