Free Diary of a Player by Brad Paisley Page B

just an hour or so, it would be too late to play for fear of waking up the neighbors. Anyway, I was losing my mind. My father, on the other hand, was enjoying every minute of seeing me in agony as he carefully cleaned his vehicle. Payback can take many forms other than money.
    At long last, we got back to our house around nine. I was flipping out because this was my ultimate dream coming true. It was like a Christmas morning moment for me. I tore apart those boxes and rushed to plug a guitar into one of my newVoxes because I had never even heard one up close. And then came a moment of pure horror—despite all my research and calculations and conversions, it was not until that exact second that I made a horrible realization: British amps came with . . . British electrical plugs!
    Try as I might, I couldn’t plug either of my new amps in. So we ran down to the hardware store to try to get some kind of adapter. By the time we got back and got the right AC cords attached, it was so late that I could barely turn the amps up because of old Mr. and Mrs. Cerra next door, but at least I was touching my amp and it was powered up and I could sneak off a few notes. I played three chords, they rang out like the sounds I imagine Saint Peter will greet us all with when we reach the pearly gates, and it was just too much. I blew a fuse. No, seriously, I blew a fuse in the amp. As it turned out, the next trip to the hardware store would be for fuses. We got to know the chap at True Value well over the next few days. Anyway, I had discovered my sound. My tone. It had arrived here by boat, from the United Kingdom, much like my own ancestors centuries before.
    As I prepared to graduate from John Marshall High School and think about my future, there could be no doubt that, musically speaking, my fuse was now already lit.
    Guitar Tips from Brad
    LESSON # 4
    Don’t play mad—but if you do, play
furious
.

5

THE CLIFFS OF ROCK CITY

    E verything I ever really needed to know about playing guitar I learned before I graduated from high school. All those days and nights when I was so busy not doing my homework and not going on hot dates, I was actually doing something very important. In retrospect, I was growing the deep musical roots that have put me where I am today—wherever that might be.
    Back in junior high, most other kids weren’t all that impressed by this little odd kid with big ears and an even bigger guitar who had somehow developed the bizarre ability to “chicken pick.” It was pretty hard to excite my peer group by playing a jazz standard like “Cherokee” or maybe some blue-grass classic like “Salty Dog” that they didn’t know.
    My musical repertoire back then was decidedly too old-fashioned for their young ears and more likely to thrill myteachers, my parents, and even my grandparents than it was to charm my classmates. I was a young man out of time and out of fashion. So as high school rolled around, I began to expand my horizons. I had to come up with some way to impress my classmates, especially the female ones. And it wasn’t going to be with “Wildwood Flower.”
    So like all kids will do, I started to discover popular music. But I could tell right away what I liked and didn’t like. I was instantly attracted to any song with a great guitar part. That would remain true to this day. Conversely, if there wasn’t much by way of “pickin’” in a pop song, my attention went out the door. Luckily, this was the late eighties. There was a plethora of pickin’.
Every
rock band had its virtuoso lead player. Van Halen had Eddie, Bon Jovi had Richie, AC/DC had Angus, ZZ Top had Billy, Toto had Luke, Spinal Tap had Nigel, and Eric Clapton had it all. I devoured this stuff. I found that with the background I’d been given learning jazz runs alongside Hank every night and a distortion pedal patched in front of the amp, I was not far off. I might have