My name is Mathieu and I live in Québec, Canada. I am 29 years old and I am a software engineer. I have been participating in this community for the past year, but I forgot to introduce myself.
I started learning music in high school. We had the choice between taking visual arts or music classes. I hated visual arts so much that I took the gamble on music even tough I didn’t know anything about it. It turned out as a great choice ! I played alto saxophone for 5 years and loved it. I even joined a small jazz band during those years.
I liked playing saxophone, but if I had the choice, I would have chosen guitar as my instrument in high school. I took a few extracurricular guitar classes with the music teacher, but unfortunately she had to cancel most of them due to her busy schedule
After high school, I went to CÉGEP. During the summer of 2011, my parents bought me an acoustic guitar Seagull Performer CW Mini-Jumbo Flame Maple. I tried my best to learn with books and youtube during the summer. After that, life got busy when I moved to another city to attend university. Studies took most of my time.
Here it is now - 10 years later when I joined Justin Guitar in 2021. I am now working on the end of Grade 2. Having a structured course with pratice routine and songs to play along really clicked with me. And this community is the cherry on the top of the cake
Hey Mathieu, welcome to the community. Glad to hear you are enjoying your progress with the guitar. My career before retirement was in software engineering and I still enjoy fiddling with software development.
I suspect it’s the same reason there are so many Australians – it’s a Justin selection bias. I think his teaching style is suitable for technically-minded STEM type folks, whereas (at least in my experience) a lot of music teachers, maybe even most music teachers, have a style suited to … well I don’t know, some other type of person I guess. It seems to work out for them sometimes, but it sure never worked out for me
Lovely intro, great picture, Mathieu. Wish you well on the adventure.
Do you still play the sax? I love the sax, though my experience is more in bluesy rock n roll than jazz … Rolling Stones in full cry with Bobby Keys blowing his horn.
PS Was a software engineer at the start of my career, now a Lean-Agile Coach and Saffa not Aussie.
@liaty@LievenDV@tony@direvus@Aaronwith2dots@Helen0609@SgtColon@JasmineJ@DavidP
Thank you all for your walm welcome. I appreciate it It’s cool to see such a supportive community of passionate guitar players. Your warm welcome gave me confidence to record my first audio of me playing. But, unfortunately, I spent the whole day dealing with customer service for the TV that I received which had a broken screen It was way less fun than the blues solo I had planned to record to try my new Scarlett hahahah !
It’s funny to see so many IT professionals around here
@SgtColon The Québec school system is a little bit different from the rest of Canada. There is a step between high school (secondary school) and university. This step (CÉGEP school) lasts 2-3 years. I don’t know if it’s like that your country ?
@Helen0609@JasmineJ Bonjour/Salut. By any chance, do you know some french words ?
@DavidP@LievenDV Unfortunately, I don’t have a saxophone at that time. Maybe one day, I’ll buy one and put it next to its guitar friends. That would make a great GAS post hahah ! Imagine the fun I would have with my new Scarlett and DAW playing music with guitar and sax
Bonjour Mathieu et bienvenue a Justin Guitar From another Quebecois, originally anyways, now I live in New Jersey, USA. You will find nothing but support with this community! Looking forward to your first video recording.
It’s funny to see so many IT professionals around here 
From another Quebecois, originally anyways, now I live in New Jersey, USA. You will find nothing but support with this community! Looking forward to your first video recording.