Well my main hobby is music, which is also my job, so I guess it's story time.
I actually always had an interest and fascination with music ever since my dad played Led Zeppelin. I really wanted to basically be as awesome as Jon Bonham on drums, and my brother wanted to play guitar.
So realizing that this wasn't just some passing fluke, my parents took my brother and I to a local music shop. He ended up getting a guitar, an amp, some cables, strings, and picks, and a guitar instruction video, and he was already off to the races, as my young 7 or 8 year old self saw it.
Meanwhile, the drum set I wanted wasn't in stock, so I had to wait with basically two pairs of drumsticks and a practice pad, as well as a drum instruction video. I did what I was supposed to, learned my basic rudiments, but to compensate for the lack of a kit for the time being, I'd use various things to function like a bass drum, snare, tom toms, and cymbals so I can start playing drums.
Eventually the drum set came, and I learned enough to learn a basic back beat, some fills, and such. And I was doing okay. But I didn't get the same feeling of satisfaction that I did with guitar.
It's really the guitar that enamored me. So when my brother was off at baseball or football practice, I'd sneak into his room, and play his guitar, and learn from the instructional video as much as I could.
Eventually my brother ended up giving me his guitar and amp, and that's when I
really started hitting guitar hard, learning everything I could, and that started in earnest around age 8 or 9.
Now, as to how I got into metal guitar, specifically, that's another fun story. See, my cousins and I used to skateboard a lot as a hobby, well, one of my cousins and his dad were taking a road trip to California where his dad's family was to have a family reunion of sorts. We were around 12 to 13 years old at this point, so he invites me, I pack up and we head to California, with my natural choice of music for the start of the trip being Led Zeppelin's song, "Going to California."
Now, at this point in my guitar journey, I was a mere young Padawan with guitar. I basically idolized Jimmy Page and David Gilmour as the exemplars of what good guitar playing was. I wasn't yet exposed to this thing called metal or shred guitar. About the heaviest music I listened to at this time was the Misfits, Ramones, and Black Flag. What a shocker, a young skater into punk rock, right?
So my cousin and my friends hung out all the time, and often during our skate sessions, we'd trade tapes and CD's for the music, and in addition to finding cool skate spots, we saw this as an opportunity to expand our music collections, which ran the gamut from AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Johnny Cash (our grandpa's influence), Pink Floyd, and various assorted classic rock and punk rock bands.
So we're traveling all through California, stopping for food and what not, so we stopped at a mall to get some food, and we saw a nice music shop there, so we got permission and some money to go buy some CD's.
So I'm going through various different artists, and I came across a peculiar album that had what looked like an Egyptian Pharaoh being carried into a pyramid with a statue of a zombified Khufu. As a kid, I did alright in school, so I knew that this was like fantasized artwork of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
The band wasn't yet a band I had heard of, their name was Iron Maiden, and the name of the album was Powerslave, written in some kind of Egyptian-y style font. I was intrigued, but I wanted to make sure I got something awesome. See, sometimes you buy a CD, and it turns out to be a gigantic letdown (*cough* Metallica's St. Anger *cough*).
So I asked the clerk there, who reeked of something musty smelling, which as an adult I now know is the reek of Cannabis. Dude was basically Otto from the Simpsons and talked like him, too.
So asked the dude, "I haven't listened to these guys, is this a good album to get into them?"
The clerk, all enthusiastically, said, "Of course, little dude! Iron Maiden rules!"
So I put down $20, popped it into my Sony Walkman, and the song "Aces High" came roaring out of my headphones in a melodic, heavy, aggressive, and harmonized fashion.
I hadn't yet heard anything this heavy, this aggressive, this melodic, and those two guitar solos! I hadn't heard playing like that yet, and the type of Powerslave CD I had was one where you'd pop it into a computer, and you'd get to watch the music videos for the singles, of which "Aces High" was one.
That second line Dave Murray played was so fast and aggressive, that I instantly had to rethink how I was playing guitar. I only spiraled further down the rabbit hole from there, with my next purchase being Iron Maiden's album The Number of the Beast.
The next 5 years was me soaking up as much metal music and metal guitar as I could. The fast, aggressive playing, the sick shred, and the attitude, all culminating into me basically exploring almost every metal genre there was, and how I could play it on the guitar.
This, mind you, was interspersed with me learning as much as I could about music theory, as well as keeping on top of my schoolwork.
It basically added up to about 5-7 hours of practice every day.
Through this period, I learned about Randy Rhoads, Marty Friedman, Steve Vai, Paul Gilbert, Jeff Loomis, Yngwie Malmsteen, Jason Becker, Tony MacAlpine, Andy LaRoque, and Chuck Schuldiner, all of whom are guitar players that I adore, and basically absorbed every lesson I could find on YouTube that they had, with the most fruitful being Yngwie Malmsteen and Paul Gilbert, who both showed me licks and exercises that I still use in my practice routines to this day.
Truth be told, my obsession with guitar has never stopped, and now the wealth of knowledge and experience I have with the instrument is pretty extensive.
That's part of the reason I write so many music focused blogs, because my mind doesn't forget musical information, ever, and I love to share the information that I've gained and accrued over many years of being excessively obsessed with guitar and making music with it.
Hope you guys liked this story!
Cheers!
) and wanted to make that. One of the ladies showed me how to cross stitch and voila... I got bitten by that cross stitch virus for the rest of my life 
