I’ve been a (mostly silent) member of this community for 2 years. Recently became more engaged after becoming a Blimmer. So I guess that it’s time for me to properly introduce myself.
I’ve been playing guitar for about 15 years on and off. My sister had bought me a nylon-string guitar for my birthday, with a 5-lessons voucher. I’ve never talked or thought about wanting to buy a guitar back then. I don’t know how she came up with the gift idea. But I fell in love with the guitar immediately. I took the 5 1-on-1 lessons and then continued following Youtube video tutorials from a really awesome guy and his assistant, the jedi master 
. So you can imagine the memories that the video Justin made recently looking back to all these years brought to me.
One interesting thing is that my taste changed many times since I started playing. But I guess that’s normal. I’ve played a lot of Bob Dylan early on. But today I am not really into playing it (although I do listen to his music). One band that I never (nor I ever will, probably) stopped playing is the Beatles. Learned some classic crowd pleases once I got an acoustic guitar, then a few rock riffs when I bought my Epiphone Les Paul, but never seemed to learn complete songs. Just riffs. Eventually, this doesn’t last.
I’ve bought and sold a decent amount of gear along the years. I had a Fender Frontman amp when I started, then added a Vox Tonelab multi-effect pedal, got myself a distortion pedal, looper, you know how this goes…
I’m minimalistic (well, you kind of have to be when you live in Barcelona with its small apartments), so I always tired not to own too many things. Even when getting a new pedal or amp, I’d sell something else.
So, for the past 5 years, I’ve settled on a Yamaha THR (the black bluesy model). I still kept some of the pedals I had just in case I wanted to use them with the Yamaha. But that felt awkward. To me at least. And the pedals were always in the way so I put them in a drawer. You know what happens when you put something in the drawer… it stays there (at least for me 
). I ended up never using any of the pedals I have. Just the Yamaha THR.
But there was something missing.
The tones the Yamaha offered were very limited. I couldn’t bother plugging pedals into it. And practicing over backing tracks or songs was not very comfortable.
I was not inspired. So I put down the electric guitar about a year ago.
That was a blessing. That got me to rediscover the acoustic guitar and improve my acoustic blues skills and fingerstyle. I even started singing 
(behind closed doors). Playing my Blueridge BR 160-A and singing is the thing I enjoy today the most. Being able to play Eric Clapton’s Hey Hey or The Beatle’s Norwegian Wood is something I never imagined. I love it.
I felt bad seeing the Telecaster and Les Paul hanging on the wall, their strings rusty. I always knew (and I think we all know) that one of the most important things is to be able to pick your instrument, and just play. So I started thinking on how to do that and made a drastic decision to sell all my pedals, my amp, and invest that money in buying a good audio interface and guitar plugin, and a DAW. For me this was a Universal Audio Volt, Guitar Rig 7, and Ableton Live.
Yes, I know, this sounds counter productive. Buying software to be able to play the electric guitar more easily. But it made sense in my head.
I now have a setup that allows me to plugin my guitar (to the audio interface), choose the song, and jam. For every backing track or song I want to play/jam to, I have a saved project in Ableton Live, with the guitar tone I want to use for that song, with the right level and panning. One thing that always bothered me when playing over a song is that I needed to turn up my guitar to hear it well enough, but then I either could hear the vocals or the drums very well. Panning works wonders for this. I pan my guitar left of George Harrison’s part is panned to the right, and it all fits.
I don’t gig. So I don’t need hardware. Obviously I don’t think it’s the ideal setup, but it is the right setup for me at the moment. Currently working on the first complete rock song to learn: Let There Be Rock.
I’m very happy to be part of this great community. Looking forward to improve and maybe share my progress.
Nadim
