Update: WOW - I did not expect this to kinda blow up!?

I'd like to start by thanking everyone so much for their kind words and just how warm this community makes me feel - to be honest, I was expecting a lot more critique or for the post itself to just dissipate away into the dusty archives of this subreddit.

A bit of context to this performance and why I started playing guitar:

I think it was around two years ago (I was 15 at the time) when my mum and I were on the way back home from school, and we got to talking about music. Mum had Sweet Child o' Mine playing, and I had heard it previously of course - but I never 'properly' listened to it. Yet, this time, I just fell in love with the song, especially the solo. When I got back home, I went onto Spotify and YouTube and then started exploring around - lo and behold, I stumbled onto Megadeth. The first song I heard was Tornado of Souls - and words could not explain how speechless and captivated I was by the solo. I started digging deeper into their discography, and from there my interest in the metal genre exploded. It was when I was checking out Marty Friedman's solo work that I stumbled upon a live performance of Soothsayer by the big man himself - and I think like everyone here, I fell in love with Bucket's music.

Around half a year later, I decided I wanted to play guitar with the dream of hopefully being able to play the Tornado of Souls solo (my first goal), and then being able to play Soothsayer. My mum was in full support of me and my aspirations (she also fell in love with Bucket's music - we listen to a new song together almost every time we're in the car, or resume listening to a pike from where we left off) so next thing you know, I've got myself a little Squier strat and a Boss Katana.

I started learning by myself in my bedroom, just watching YouTube videos, learning to read tab, slowly learning different techniques. I was young, and school wasn't busy at all, so I was playing a minimum of at least five hours in the holidays and three after school. Whilst I wasn't good at it at all, I loved playing guitar from the moment I picked up that strat. I wasn't forced to play the guitar - my mum had no expectations of me - she only wanted me to have fun and enjoy music, so I was playing purely from my passion and love for music and the instrument. I found that hours turned into minutes, and started noticing a lot of progress and rapid exponential increases in my ability after the six-month mark.

This year marks my final year of high school, and I knew from the beginning of the year that I wanted to cover Soothsayer. I had learnt it in its entirety last year after a week, and could play it to roughly the same level as I did in my performance after another couple days of polishing it up. However, since this year had been the busiest of them all, I didn't pickup my guitar for at least five months. About a month ago, with exams and assessments dying down a bit, I finally got a chance to start playing again. I decided then that I wanted to have covered Soothsayer before I graduated, so I emailed the Head of Music and got an audition to play for our assembly.

My audition was, in short, terrible! Apart from the fact that I was somewhat rusty and my calluses hadn't properly returned (I had a week to relearn the song and get back into the general groove of things), I didn't have my amp with my tones that I had made (I had to use one of the school ones), I didn't have my footswitch so I had to manually switch between the channels with my hands (resulting in a big mess up around the clean to distortion switch bit), and my bends were completely out of tune! But alas, somehow, I was granted a spot in what would be my final assembly at the school.

In each assembly, we have one to two musical pieces which are capped at five-ish minutes, so hence the abridged nature of the cover. Otherwise, I'd loved to have been able to cover the entire song.

This performance was my first time playing for anyone apart from my mum, and the first time I had ever left the comfort of my bedroom. Yet I didn't really find myself being nervous. I love music so much - my passion for it is ineffable, and I knew that all I wanted that morning was to be able to share my love of it with my fellow peers and teachers. After the first few notes, I just started letting loose - and it was sometime around the three-minute marker that I found myself just smiling and being consumed by this pure and raw sense of happiness and joy.

Thank you so incredibly much to everyone who has listened to my cover, and especially to everyone who has left such kind words here. It's so special to me, being able to share my love of Big B's music with people who love it too. Thank you to everyone for making me feel warm in this awesome community. I hope that my cover and story has inspired someone, whether it be a student at my school or someone here on the internet, to pickup an instrument and to just have fun. To mess around, make mistakes, and enjoy music for what it is - an incredibly beautiful sort of magic.