Beginner guitarists, too, are also
usually influenced by their favorite artists to pick up the instrument. It can
get one into thinking, “Well, what did Jimi Hendrix play when he started? How
about Slash? Brian May? George Harrison and Eric Clapton?”
Well, what did these famous
guitarists play when they were beginning their
music journey? Read on to find out!
Jimi
Hendrix
The great Jimi Hendrix was 16 when his
father bought him his first guitar, an acoustic. He taught himself to play
(there were no online guitar
lessons yet for self-taught guitarists). A year later, he got his first
electric guitar, which was a right-handed Supro Ozark. The left-handed Hendrix
flipped the guitar upside down to play it.
Slash
This rock god’s first guitar was a
Spanish acoustic guitar that has only one string. It took Slash some time to
put the other five strings in. Then, when he was around 15 or 16 he got Les
Paul - not a Gibson though (well, not yet), but a copy by Memphis that cost
around $60. Read about Slash’s later gear here.
Brian
May
Way before he made the one-of-a-kind Red
Special with his dad, a young Dr. May played his dad’s George Formby
banjo-ukulele. His parents bought him an Egmond acoustic guitar for his 7th
birthday. Soon, he began experimenting with it - putting pickups on it and
plugging it into a homemade amp. He still has that acoustic guitar to this day.
George
Harrison
There are three accounts about what
George Harrison’s first guitar was. The first, according to fellow Beatle Paul
McCartney, is that it was a homemade Hawaiian-style solid body guitar. The
second account is the more widely known: the young guitarist got an Egmond 105,
a Spanish-style beginner’s guitar that had steel strings and a sunburst finish
(it’s now in Liverpool, on display at the Beatles Story Museum).
In the third account, Harrison’s parents
were moving into a new home, and before they left his mother Louise gave a
neighbor his old guitar - a no-label nylon string acoustic guitar stowed away
in a cupboard - which he used to practice on as a child. Many have started to
believe that this could very well be Harrison’s first guitar.
Eric
Clapton
For his 13th birthday, Eric Clapton’s
grandparents bought him his first guitar for £2, a German-made acoustic Hoyer
that resembles a Spanish guitar but equipped with steel strings. Clapton found
it painfully difficult to play, so he left it to gather dust for a couple of
years before he played it again. His first electric guitar was also something
his supportive grandparents helped him buy - it was a semi-hollow Kay Jazz II,
a clone of the more expensive Gibson ES-335.
What do you think of these musicians’
first guitars? What would you like
your first guitar to be?