My parents enrolled me to take private piano lessons when I was 5. It was fun and I learned how to read basic music. But years after that, without practice and application, I forgot everything.

I heard the song Bullet the Blue Sky by U2 in 1988 so I got my dad to buy me the Joshua Tree cassette tape. I enjoyed it a lot but it wasn’t until Achtung Baby that made me a hard core U2 fan. I went ahead and bought all their albums. At the time, War became my favorite and the guitar riffs led me to buying a guitar when I was in the 8th grade. It was a crappy, generic electric that came with an amp that buzzed a lot so I hardly used it.

The first tune I learned to play was Sunday Bloody Sunday from reading tablature. It was fairly easy to learn. I got more tablature books by Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Dire Straits.

I lost interest in playing the guitar by my sophomore year in high school.

10 years later in 2005, I bought an acoustic Ibanez guitar. I felt the need to rekindle what I enjoyed doing in the past and also learning to read music.