Electric

Started: 2026-03-18 15:07:37

Submitted: 2026-03-18 16:27:01

Visibility: World-readable

Buying an electric guitar, which is probably not a mid-life crisis

The day that the deal closed and my startup was acquired by a big-tech company, I went out and bought an electric guitar.

Stagg electric guitar

I went to my local music shop I Santa Cruz, called "The Starving Musician", located right next door to downtown's favorite music venue Catalyst. (When there's a line to get into a show the line spreads out on the sidewalk in front of the store on Pacific Ave and wraps around the corner around the store's small parking lot. While waiting in line I can look into the store and see the fancy guitars set out for display.) I said I wanted to learn guitar and I got a Stagg SEL-HB-90-BLK, after playing with a couple of equivalently-priced guitars on the shelf and picking mostly on aesthetics.

I also got a practice amp, a Yamaha THR5. It has plenty of bells and whistles to keep me busy for a while: five presets plus knobs to control the preamp gain (important for selecting the right amount of distortion to get the right fuzzy guitar sound) and other aspects of the sound. I can crank up the distortion and play a power chord and pretend I'm a rock star.

While the amp is on, amber LEDs shine inside the chassis, behind the retro grille, to invoke the effect of tubes glowing softly to power the amp. (I saw a couple of tube amps in the music store but I wasn't tempted.) The box that the amp came in looks retro too; I think it's new but it was printed to look faded, like it had been sitting in the back of a warehouse for years.

Yamaha THR5 amp

I got a guitar book at the music store, and Kiesa got me a few more for Christmas. I've been working slowly through the books and now I can play most of the open major chords and many minor chords (except for F and B, because I can't get the barre to work right). I can play several simple songs (as both lead and rhythm). (It turns out that it's been several decades since I tried to read music, and I still haven't memorized the position of treble clef notes and their mapping to the frets on the guitar.) I'm building up the calluses on the fingertips of my left hand; they've now reached the point where I'm getting used to the idea that my fingertips feel slightly different than they used to. So basically I know enough to be dangerous; and it's fun to play music that actually sounds basically right.

My amp has a USB-B port in the back and this week I got around to plugging it into the Mac Mini I have sitting on my desk. (I use the Mac Mini mostly to run iTunes for my music library; and because it's the M2 model I worked on the thermal control for the Mac, starting with initial sensor bringup, uncovering a nasty bug in the platform design, and setting up the initial thermal control loops, before handing it off to a colleague who had just joined the team. I named it "Arboghast" because my naming convention for Macs is "ships from The Expanse".) After I found and installed the right drivers (and found the setting to relax the security settings so that I could install the right drivers) the amp showed up as a device in Garage Band, with different inputs for the raw signal from the guitar and the post-effects audio. Garage Band gave me a whole new set of amps to choose from, many of them with their own skin for the knobs on the amp to go with different gains to make the guitar sound different.

At some point I'll figure out how to get Garage Band to give me a drum track, then I'll be well on my way to playing rock songs. And then I'll figure out how to set up a sequencer and with that I can do anything.

My real goal is to have fun and play some music; and maybe to acquire a new hobby to fill time I would otherwise use to doom-scroll.

As mid-life crises go, buying a guitar seems relatively inexpensive and much less destructive than most of my other choices.