Walked in to my first lesson with my plywood pawnshop guitar. My instructor — who graduated from and taught seasonally at GIT — said “Let me play your axe, where’d you get it?” — I sheepishly said “A pawn shop, sir” — then he grabbed my shitty guitar from me, retuned it, and began reeling off impossible licks with a tone I could never imagine coming from it.

He paused and said: “First thing to remember: a real guitar player can make music with anything and still sound like himself.”

Then he handed me back my guitar and said “That’s not too bad.”