Hi there and welcome to 40 Something Blues. I’m Gareth Watson a guitarist from Northern Ireland. I started this website as both a learning tool and as a way of documenting my guitar journey.
My 1st guitar journey began back when I was in my early teens and ended in my very early 20s. At 38 years old I decided to start learning to play again and 2 years into that I decided to start this blog.
The first band I properly fell in love with was Queen. The movie Wayne’s World is responsible for that. Up until then music wasn’t really on my radar at all but when I heard Bohemian Rhapsody it blew my mind. I got my hands on a Queen greatest hits album that contained it and the floodgates opened.
From there I got into Def Leppard and then Metallica which snowballed into listening to everything from The Eagles and Bad Company to Slayer and Sepultura.
I wanted to learn to play guitar. I bought a really cheap acoustic guitar off a friend for a few quid and used a 2 penny coin as my plectrum. It wasn’t long after that my parents bought me my first proper electric guitar, a sunburst Squier stratocaster. At some point I replaced this with a black Epiphone SG, a decision influenced by Kenny Hickey of Type O Negative, which I still own to this day (although it is now heavily modified).
I ended up playing in a number of bands including a metal cover band, a rock cover band and a band that played and wrote its own original music. In university I was asked to join a friends band but my input in that fizzled out after a couple of practice sessions and by that stage I had already started to lose interest in the instrument.
During the next 20 years I graduated (twice), got married, and became a father to 3 girls. In my mid to late 20s I got heavily into web development which became my career after I learnt how to build a website in order to write kung fu movie reviews and publish them online. During my 30s I discovered Muay Thai and trained in that frequently while my web development career continued to grow. I also dabbled with running my own part time web and graphic design business as a side hustle.
It was after turning 38 that I started thinking about getting back into playing the guitar again. My 40s were looming and I didn’t want to spend my days and nights writing code. I made the decision to wrap up the side hustle and pick up the guitar again. Specifically the black Epiphone SG which I still had from my teen years. It managed to survive student halls, a number of student houses and several moves with my then girlfriend and now wife until we bought our first and current house.
I set myself a new years goal for 2018 and that was to start playing guitar again. So on New Years Eve 2017 I created an account on Justin Guitar and started working through his material.
This was an odd experience. Some of the mechanics of playing came back to me, I could remember the main open string chords and the major and minor bar chord shapes. I couldn’t remember scales and I couldn’t really remember anything that I had learnt from my teen years. In many ways it was frustrating but I just accepted that as being part of the process.
I now go to lessons when I can with an extremely talented guitarist who keeps me right. My guitar journey these days has a heavy dose of music theory which is something that I thought was too boring way back when I wanted to downpick like James Hetfield. The more I learn the more fascinating I find it. It’s interesting to see how different things all fit together and I’m looking forward to learning more.
I started this blog as a way to document my progress but also as a way to help with my own learning. One of the best ways to absorb information is to teach what you have learnt to someone else. As I learn things I am going to document my understanding of them on this site.
The website is also a platform to deep dive into bands and guitarists that influence me in some way. In fact since getting back into guitar I have been introduced to a number of guitarists that influence me as much as my childhood heroes did. You’ll learn about them in upcoming articles.
The name of the website is a play on turning 40 and how some people can feel a bit down about that. I took the idea of turning 40 and feeling “blue” and put a spin on it. 40 Something Blues refers to being 40 and playing the blues. But this website is not just about blues music. I grew up on pretty much every genre of guitar music going and they will all get a mention here.
Thanks for reading.
Photo credit for main banner image: Cairo Silva (via Unsplash)