"I taught myself to play guitar. It’s incredibly easy when you understand
the science of it. The skinny strings play the high sounds, and the fat
strings play the low sounds. If you put your finger on the string
farther out by the tuning end, it makes a lower sound. If you want to
play fast move your hand fast and if you want to play slower move your
hand slower. That’s all there is to it. You can learn the names of notes
and how to make chords that other people use, but that’s pretty
limiting. Even if you took a few years and learned all the chords you’d
still have a limited number of options. If you ignore the chords your
options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day.
Traditionally, guitars have a fat string on the top and they get
skinnier and skinnier as they go down. But the thing to remember is it’s
your guitar and you can put whatever you want on it. I like to put six
different sized strings on it because that gives the most variety, but
my brother used to put all of the same thickness on so he wouldn’t have
so much to worry about. What ever string he hit had to be the right one
because they were all the same. Tuning the guitar is kind of a
ridiculous notion. If you have to wind the tuning pegs to just a certain
place, that implies that every other place would be wrong. But thats
absurd. How could it be wrong? It’s your guitar and you’re the one
playing it. It’s completely up to you to decide how it should sound. In
fact I don’t tune by the sound at all. I wind the strings until they’re
all about the same tightness. I highly recommend electric guitars for a
couple of reasons. First of all they don’t depend on body resonating for
the sound so it doesn’t matter if you paint them. And also, if you put
all the knobs on your amplifier on 10 you can get a much higher reaction
to effort ratio with an electric guitar than you can with an acoustic.
Just a tiny tap on the strings can rattle your windows, and when you
slam the strings, with your amp on 10, you can strip the paint off the
walls. The first guitar I bought was a Silvertone. Later I bought a
Fender Telecaster, but it really doesn’t matter what kind you buy as
long as the tuning pegs are on the end of the neck where they belong. A
few years back someone came out with a guitar that tunes at the other
end. I’ve never tried one. I guess they sound alright but they look
ridiculous and I imagine you’d feel pretty foolish holding one. That
would affect your playing. The idea isn’t to feel foolish."
I had never heard of these guys but as it happens they have been around forever (well, 1975 anyway...). However, I had seen and been deeply affected by Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary `The Devil and Daniel Johnston` a few years ago., and just found out he also made a documentary on Half Japanese called `The Band That Would Be King`. Have to source that somehow.
In a more morbid vein, I found out poking around on the web that Kurt Cobain was wearing a Half Japanese T shirt when he died - Kurt says, regarding number 38 on the list `Kurt Cobain`s Top 50 Albums`` (http://www.angelfire.com/rock3/nirvana81/kurttop.htm):
Half Japanese - We Are They Who Ache With Amorous Love
Check this stuff out and feel all those anxieties and insecurities you cling to around gear, technique, and competitive self-importance start washing away.....Kurt says: "I like to listen to Jad Fair and Half Japanese with headphones on, walking around shopping malls - in the heart of the American culture. I just think that, if people could hear this music right now, they'd melt, they wouldn't know what to do, they'd start bouncing off the walls and hyperventilating. So I turn up the music really loud and pretend it's blasting through the speakers in the mall."
