Well, now I was at a point where I was playing in school and at mass. I kept listening to songs on the radio over and over again. I was never a writer of songs, so I just listened to the guitar parts in every song. I remember trying to figure out the song in my head by paying attention to the low end of the song. What I mean is the bass part.
I put everything out of my mind and listened intensely at this. I hummed it in my head and tried to slow it down as well. Once I started out with the bass components, the chords just started to pop in place. My knowledge of chords was limited so, that is when I asked Mrs. Lord if she had anything more up her sleeve, so she gave me this book, and I dived into it. She had started me out on “The bar Chords”!
This was really cool because no one else in our class was doing it but me. This opened up some area that was fun for me! I tried to simplify what I was shown (imagine playing a B chord without barring the second fret) and tried making a more bassie/bottom end sound to the chord. That is when I started barring the chords the way everyone else does. This helped me obtain that rock sound that was being played on the radio at the time. For the longest time I tried to figure out how they got that sound, it must have been that big black thing with lights and knobs on it that I saw at the school concert.
How did everyone start out figuring songs at a young age, like this?