|Rick Bishop wrote: Years later I started messing around on guitar again and tried to learn what I could from records and the radio. This was a bad concept and I don't recommend it to anybody. I then started playing by trial and error, remembering the musical patterns and sounds that my grandfather and his friends used to play. I built on that until I felt I could go in any direction I wanted without any rules. After a while I began buying advanced guitar theory books, having no idea what they were all about, and started interpreting them in a way that made little or no sense to anybody else. I would seek out and try to invent chords and lines that were based on shapes and designs as opposed to those that are based on any standard musical theory. If certain invented chords or lines didn't sound good, I would change the tuning of the guitar instead of changing the chord design or the individual note patterns. I had my own highly personalized system of visual guitar geometrics and I convinced myself, with very little effort, that it was the correct way to approach the instrument. By doing things the hard way, eventually everything else became easy. Later on people started coming to me asking for guitar lessons, but I would never do that to anyone! Everybody is better off when they learn on their own.