Yet again, you find yourself drinking alone in your crummy apartment because another girlfriend has left you for a goddamned musician. As always, he's a scruffy guitarist with no money and no redeeming qualities. This gets you thinking, 'Hey, I bet I could play the guitar, and then I could be that douchebag getting all the play.'
I've got good news for you, friend: it can be done, and it isn't all that hard.
The first thing to do is go out and get yourself a guitar. Since you don't have one already, I'm assuming a few things about you:
1. You DO have a job.
2. You DON'T have a goatee.
3. You're NOT an alcoholic.
So, go to your local guitar store and get the prettiest, coolest, most expensive guitar you can afford. Should you lack funds for some reason, spend at least 100 dollars on a decent acoustic guitar. Next, refer to the list above and rectify these problems. Quit your job, stop shaving, and pick up that bottle. You want to get women, right? They love scruffy drunks. Bonus points if you're abusive.
Now, just having a guitar doesn't make you a guitarist. You have to let everybody know you're a guitarist. This means pictures of you holding the guitar, making a crazy face like you're really rocking. Put these on your Facebook page (even better, sign up for MySpace if you haven't already, this is the digital epicenter for third-tier musicians) and make sure to include captions about how much you love rocking out.
I know you're just itching to start playing the guitar and learning things, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Before you learn how to play guitar, you have to start a band. Relax, anyone who's ever played Rock Band once or twice is totally qualified to start a band. Just go to Guitar Center and tell some people you're working on this 'side-project' that's a mix of Pink Floyd, Ozzy, and The Commodores. This will suggest to them that you're awesome and they should join your band.
Once you've recruited three or four hardy souls, you need to name your band. Any combination of the following words will suffice: demon, soul, black, knife, blast, edge. Leave out the space between words, throw the letter 'y' in there a few times, and you're rolling.
Examples: demynEDGE, KnyfeBlast, blacKnyfe...
Probably band naming is a megatask deserving of its own article. Something to consider.
Again, hold your horses, it's not time to start learning how to play yet. No, now that you have a band, you need to start gigging out. Find a bar, stand at the mic holding your glorious guitar, and just keep asking, "Everybody feelin' good? Everybody ready to ROCK?" If your band starts playing behind you, just scream incoherently and pretend to play the guitar.
Don't ACTUALLY play the guitar, or people will realize that you suck.
Now, the next step is not to learn how to play, no the next step is to think like a guitarist. Rather than writing/learning songs, the average musician spends all day on craigslist.org bitching about other musicians and making posts riddled with grammatical and syntax errors.
Are you drunk right now? No? Clearly you haven't been paying attention, and I'm already starting to question your commitment. Pop open a beer. Now. I'll wait.
There we go. Now we're rolling. Now that you're gigging, it's time to think about expanding your band's horizons. Here are some ways to do this: make a music video using a digital camcorder and post it on YouTube and the aforementioned MySpace, make demos, spam thousands of random people to become your fans, enter some Battle of the Bands competitions and hand out lots of those demos.
By now, you've probably got a recording contract and some groupies. If you have any energy left, you can now learn to play the guitar.
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