Coffee, Cigarettes & Guitars ...

... Three of my favourite things.

Dust N' Guitars

I remember building something you could call a slide guitar out of one string wrapped around two nails on a board back when I was around eleven. Man, I spend hours fiddling around with that thing, amazed at how simple it was to produce a tone. But the first time I played a real guitar was at a party when I was eighteen. We were starting to get pretty drunk after having played some serious hardcore drinking games, and there were this guy who had brought his guitar, which he'd been playing while singing - very well I might add. Well, we were sitting around talking and he handed me this guitar and asked me if I played, I said I'd never, so he showed me a few chords. It was instant love, like through a shock of lightning I found something I was passionate about and it was playing guitar. Could've easily been the booze talking but two days later I bought my first guitar.

I don't know why it took me so long to discover my love for playing guitars. I've always been interested in playing music and had a keyboard when I was ten years old, so why I never got the idea of picking up a guitar is beyond me. I never had any proper lessons in playing anything, back at age ten I just loved hitting random notes on the keyboard that occasionally made sense. Never did learn to read music - still haven't sufficiently.

My first guitar was a spanish Santana guitar. It was a decent guitar to begin with, nothing special though. I found some chord diagrams and scales on the internet and played till my fingers bleed. I loved it, a day without time to play was a bad day. Apart from whatever written lessons I was able to find on the internet, I never had any lessons in playing, so the process of playing well came slow, but I got there.

Then one day I was visiting a music store in Aarhus to buy picks, I looked through the electric guitar section and fell in love with an Epiphone Les Paul. It looked like the ultimate rock guitar with it's stunning design, and so I ended up buying it and a small Marshall 15 MG amp. That was the turning point for me. My ambition was never to play electric guitar, all I wanted at that time was strumming chords and singing my favourite songs, but that Les Paul possessed me into playing rock and blues and I'm thankful for that.


Picking up a guitar is the best thing that's ever happened to me, it's given my love for music in general a boost and my favourite thing to do today is writing songs, or just sitting in my room playing till my fingers hurt.

I still have that Les Paul, though I've modified it and put in two new pick-ups. I gave the Santana to my brother and bought a western Washburn D10 which is the guitar I play the most. My newest guitar is a Fender Telecaster that sounds just as good as it looks, but my favourite guitar is still and will probably continue to be the Les paul.