I remember it like it was yesterday. I was knocked off my feet when I heard “Crossroads”, a Robert Johnson traditional blues, by the Cream for the very first time. Until then, I never thought of picking up an instrument and try to learn how to play.

A friend of mine had started playing the guitar three years before me. We were sitting in his bedroom and we were listening to “Crossroads” coming out of his little tape recorder. And he just played along the song. The riff, the solo, just everything. That left me deeply impressed and motivated enough to get a guitar and start to learn how to play it.

Everybody advised me to get a simple and cheap acoustic guitar, but I refused to listen to them. I wanted to be like my friend. And he was playing a cool electric guitar, which was a Fender Stratocaster re-build. Plus he had a nice Marshall amp and this is exactly what I wanted for me, too.

And indeed I went out and got myself an electric guitar by the brand “Rockson”. I never heard of them before and if I’m perfectly honest, I guess the reason why I bought it was simply due to its white color. I had seen Jimi Hendrix playing a similar guitar that looked like that one – plus, it was also very inexpensive.

And boy was it a lousy guitar. The neck wasn’t really straight and the frets were uneven. But it didn’t matter to me. It was my first guitar and I started to play. Well, I should rather say, I wanted to play.

The first thing that I noticed was that I had no talent at all. Learning even the easiest things took me forever. Or just tuning the instrument was nightmare. I’m sure I broke countless strings because I strained them a little bit too much. And there was another thing I had to realize; my finger tips really hurt since I used metal strings, because I insisted playing an electric guitar against the advice I was given.

Against all odds, I still made slow but good progress. It probably took me way longer than it should have, but at least I didn’t give up. And now, 20 years later, I’m not as technically savvy as an Eddie VanHalen, but I can play quite well according to the feedback I get from others.

Sometimes I played extensively and other times just a little bit. But I never stopped completely. And even if there’s not enough time, I just try to get ten minutes in to practice a new scale or riff. That helps my fingers to stay flexible.

It’s a wonderful hobby and even nowadays that the era of Rock ‘n’ Roll seems to have passed, even my kids like watch and listen when I play a Boogie or Blues.

The German author Ulrich Dietherr runs a German website called German musik instrumente gitarren and features articles about electric guitars, or e Gitarre made in Germany.