Guitar Lessons in Tulsa | Why I Love the Guitar
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
All right. In this third podcast of a Curtis Music Academy, the Curtis Music Academy podcast. My topic today is why I personally, why Stephen Cornell, who loves guitar, why Stephen Butano, Stephen Cornell loves music in general. Honestly. just so you have a little bit, a bit of background. I started playing guitar at the age of 12. My Dad, who is a graphic designer is incredible human being. Incredible man, incredible leader, brought in a cheap $20 matte black guitar from target down the street, when I was a 12 year old during Christmas. And so he came back from work that day and without a case, without anything other than a guitar, he was holding by the neck. He walked in the house and said, I have a guitar and somebody is going to learn how to play this. And so me and my siblings were on the floor. I was 12 years old.
My brother was 13. My younger brother was like nine. My two baby sisters at the time were all sitting on the living room floor playing with toys and toy cars. And when I heard him, I simply raised my hand and said, I’ll do it. And so he said, here you go. So he handed me that little black guitar and I began to pluck away in my guitar. I probably played for an 30 minutes to an hour that day and every day after that until I was about 16. And so I, when I started playing, it was just by year. I didn’t take any Guitar Lessons in Tulsa until I turned 16. But in the meantime, in that from 12 to 16 at four years period, I was just kind of plucking and picking out sounds that I kind of heard and putting together chords. I even started watching youtube videos upon like on how to play certain songs and what a chord was and how to play certain chords and where they were on the fret board, learning about the anatomy of the guitar.
And I really began to take ownership of the instrument and really begin to learn, as many aspects as I knew to look up at that time. And so after about four years of playing by ear, even in that time, I had written a few songs, a few mini songs. They were incredible or anything like that. But, I had definitely a future ahead of me. And if you’re wondering, I’m only 23. and so I’ve been playing guitar for officially 11 years now. And so I’m really proud of that and I’m proud to have had such an awesome said jobs and parents that, you know, really opened us to that at such a young age. I do come from a musical family, so music is not a foreign concept to my family. My mother is a songwriter and a singer and my dad is also a songwriter and singer who loves to take Guitar Lessons in Tulsa.
And so they actually met in Nashville doing music and, met through some friends who they both knew and just kind of circled around. And here I am. And so, but, my dad, it comes from a very prominent musical family as well as my mother. And, so it was no, no new thing to me as a kid to be introduced to a musical instrument. and since I’ve seen it around my, you know, siblings and things like that, family members, cousins, aunts, uncles, my entire life. And so, when my dad brought them the guitar, he was just, furthering the, the legacy. He was just,, putting a demand on his children to learn another instrument or to learn something musical so that we can then pass it down. He knew what he was doing, but I didn’t at the time.
And so anyways, in that, back to the story in those four years, I was playing by ear and learned a few chords on my own enough to write maybe two to three songs in that four year period. And then, when I turned 16, I actually got Guitar Lessons in Tulsa from an incredible guitar player who now lives in La and travels doing music. He’s actually been, I requested as a recording artist himself and has done many awesome things that if I told you what they were, he would know of or know of his work. And so it’s awesome to finally get, you know, the chance to maybe even do something like that. Funny thing is he’s now my brother in law, so his youngest sister, I actually ended up marrying and so they actually come from a very musical family as well. So now I am also a part of my own musical family and hopefully in the near future, and the to actually, I’m not going to say near future, I’m going to say distant future because I’m only 23.
And me and my wife agreed to have kids after five to seven years. So in the distant future, maybe a music family of our own. And so when I was 16, I got Guitar Lessons in Tulsa, from an awesome gentlemen who was a little older than I was at the time. or at the time now. And, he had, you know, really brought to light music theory when I began to, to understand music theory, how scales, what a scale was, how courts are built from scales and intervals and how, music is arranged and what things are called and putting names to things and creating some order and really getting the order of things. My, the light bulbs really began to fire. That’s where I really began to, things began to click for me and I began to play even more at home when I got home.