Hello all

I've just found this site hours ago and through my reading, I have found lots of valuable information and so many nice people. So far, I haven't seen any out of the way comments/replies to posts. Seems like a very nice community to be a part of.

So, on to the introduction. My name is Jim Johnson and was born and raised in southeast Kentucky, USA. I live in a small town with low population. Very peaceful (most of the time) and overall a nice place to live. Ever since I can remember I've always been into guitar, and I got my first real axe on my 6th birthday. Before that I had a tiny little rinky dink $20 mini acoustic guitar. So my first real guitar was a black harmony electric guitar. I couldn't tell you if the fretboard was ebony or rosewood, but it was dark wood. That really doesn't matter at this point I guess. So I got the guitar and I had no idea what to do with it. It came with a small practice amp, an extra set of strings, some guitar picks, the required cable and if I remember correctly it also had a small booklet with the basic chords and some beginner's songs to play.
I didn't take well to learning from the book though. I didn't want to play chords. I wanted to ROCK! At the time though, I only knew one other person who played the guitar, and mainly what they showed me was the power chord. At my young age "Power Chord" just sounded awesome, and it really sounded like ROCK despite the fact that the most distortion I could get from the amp was just cranking the volume to 11 and attacking the strings heavily.
So the first song I learned was none other than Enter Sandman. I played it very poorly, but I didn't care. I was learning! I loved playing my guitar. It was everything that I imagined and MORE!

So I've never took any formal guitar lessons mostly because of the lack of musicians in the area, and so I just continued to learn parts of songs that I could figure out by ear. I remember that my music teacher told me that I had an exceptionally good ear for music, and I when I look back on it, I can remember before I ever got a guitar I'd bought a cheap recorder for $3. I had figured out how to play numerous little tunes on it only using my ear, and I always wanted to show what I could do to my teacher.

I kept playing my guitar all the time until I reached the age of 12 or so. At that time I started getting into other things and almost lost interest in guitar altogether, even though I still played it. I didn't play every day like before. My guess is that it was due to becoming a teenager and wanting to explore other parts of life. I never really picked my guitar back up until I was 16 or 17 and before too long I finally realized that I wasn't really getting any better. I was just learning to play more songs. Some of them were challenging ofcourse, but they all were really just the same thing. Since then. I've sortof been stuck in a rut, where I've nearly reached the peak of my abilities. I don't think it's due to the fact that it's not physically possible. I just don't know where to start learning the more technical parts of playing.
I do know the major scale, and can play it in any location on the neck, but from there I don't know where to go. I don't exactly know how to utilize a scale when playing solo, but I do know there's more to it than just playing up and down the notes of a scale.

Well. I guess that about somes it up. I'll definately be spending a lot of time here. =]