How I Bought My First Guitar and Wrote My First Song

I still remember the afternoon I decided enough was enough. I'd been humming melodies into a voice memo app for months, and every time I played back those rough recordings, I could hear exactly where the missing pieces were. A real instrument, something I could press my fingers against, was the only way to turn those sketches into something honest.

Growing up in suburban Melbourne, I spent a lot of time listening to my parents' record collection. The Beatles, Cat Stevens, and a handful of Australian folk acts like Paul Kelly filled the house with stories I wanted to tell myself. By the time I hit my twenties, I had notebooks full of half-finished lyrics but no way to bring them to life.

So on a rainy Saturday in Brunswick, I wandered into a second-hand music shop with a couple of hundred dollars in my pocket and a vague idea of what I wanted. What happened over the next few months changed the way I listen, write, and play.

The Day I Walked Into the Brunswick Music Shop

Brunswick has always been one of those suburbs where creativity spills out onto the footpaths. The shop was tucked between a cafe doing a roaring trade in flat whites and a vintage clothing store blasting Nick Cave from a tinny speaker. I stood outside for a moment, looking at the faded lettering on the window, trying to convince myself I was ready to spend the money I'd been saving from weekend bar shifts.

Inside, the place smelled like dust, rosin, and decades of musicians leaving their mark. Every wall held at least a dozen guitars, some hanging in careful rows, others stacked in corners waiting for someone to rescue them. The bloke behind the counter had a grey beard and the kind of patience you only find in people who genuinely love what they sell. He asked what kind of music I wanted to play, and when I hesitated, he pulled out three acoustics without another word.

I spent nearly two hours strumming each one. He tuned them for me, showed me where the frets sat, and didn't once rush me toward the register. By the time I left, I was carrying a battered Maton with a few dings on the body and a sound that felt warm even before I really knew what I was doing. The price was fair, and the walk up Sydney Road felt like the longest two kilometres of my life.

Choosing the Right Instrument for a First-Timer

When you're buying your first guitar, it's tempting to grab the shiniest one in the room or the cheapest option you can find online. Neither approach worked well for me. I tried a flashy electric in a chain store a few weeks earlier and felt nothing. I also looked at a few hundred-dollar acoustics on a marketplace app and worried they'd warp in a week.

The Maton I eventually bought was Australian-made, which mattered more than I expected. There's something reassuring about an instrument built not far from where you learned to play it. It had a slightly wider neck than the cheaper models I'd tried, which made it easier for my clumsy fingers to land on the right frets without cramping up.

The shop owner told me to bring it back in a month for a free setup, and he scribbled his number on the back of the receipt. I never went back for the setup, but I did call him six months later when I wanted to buy my first capo. He remembered the Maton, asked how the songwriting was going, and threw in the capo for free. That kind of relationship with a local shop is something you can't replicate online.

The First Chord and the First Pain

Learning the basic open chords felt like learning a new language. G, C, D, and E minor were the first four I tackled, mostly because every song I loved used them somewhere. For the first few days, my fingertips turned red and raw. I kept thinking I'd made a terrible mistake and that I'd wasted my money.

The breakthrough came on a Tuesday evening when I was sitting on the back porch of my share house in Fitzroy. I'd been fumbling through a Paul Kelly song for about an hour, and suddenly the chord changes lined up. My left hand knew where to go before my brain did, and for the first time, the guitar sounded like music and not just noise.

From there, things snowballed quickly. I learned barre chords, basic fingerpicking patterns, and a few simple strumming rhythms by watching online clips and pestering a mate who played in a folk duo at the pub on Smith Street. Within two months, I could play through a handful of songs without having to look at my hand every two seconds. The pain in my fingertips had faded into thick calluses, and I started looking forward to picking up the guitar instead of dreading it.

Writing the First Song on the Train Home

The song came to me on the Frankston line, somewhere between Flinders Street and Caulfield. I'd been thinking about a friend who'd moved to Perth for work and how the distance was pulling at our friendship. The melody arrived first, a simple descending pattern that felt like a sigh, and the lyrics followed over the next three stops.

I recorded the idea on my phone with the train noise still audible in the background. By the time I got home, I had a verse and a chorus scribbled in my notebook, plus a rough recording that made me laugh because you could hear the train announcer warning us about a signal failure at Richmond. That hiss and rumble ended up becoming part of the demo.

Over the next week, I refined the chords, worked out a simple bridge, and added a second verse about missing Sunday arvo sessions at the pub. The whole song came together in about four days, which felt impossibly fast after months of staring at blank pages. I'd written something real, something that sounded the way the feeling in my chest felt, and that was enough.

Recording It Properly at a Mate's Studio

The demo on my phone served its purpose, but I wanted a cleaner recording. A friend from uni had set up a small home studio in his garage in Northcote, and he agreed to help me track the song on a wet Saturday when the cricket was on in the background. We mic'd up the Maton, set up a single condenser overhead, and ran three takes while the rain drummed on the tin roof.

The first take was too quiet. The second take had a wrong chord in the bridge that we kept because it added character. The third take was the keeper, and we mixed it in about an hour using nothing more than a borrowed laptop and a free trial of a recording program. The whole thing sounded raw and imperfect, but it sounded like me.

When I played the final version back, I felt a strange mix of pride and embarrassment. Pride because I'd actually finished something. Embarrassment because I could hear every wobble in my voice and every missed finger placement. That honesty, though, ended up being the most valuable thing about the recording. Anyone listening could hear a real person learning as they went.

Sharing the Song and What Came Next

Once the song was mixed, I uploaded it to a music platform and shared the link on my personal social media. The first person to reply was my mum, who said she teared up at the bridge. The second was the friend the song was about, who sent me a voice note saying it made him want to book a flight home.

I kept writing after that. Some songs were better than others. A few ended up on EPs I tracked in loungerooms and bedrooms, and you can find some of that early work through my music blog, where I've been documenting the journey in sequential posts since the beginning.

The most important lesson I learned from that first song is that finishing something matters more than getting it perfect. Every musician I admire has a drawer full of rough demos and unreleased ideas, and the only thing that separates the songs that get heard from the ones that stay private is the decision to press record and share them.

Recommendations for Anyone Buying Their First Guitar

• Visit a local independent music shop rather than a chain store or a marketplace app. The advice alone will be worth the trip, and you'll build a relationship that pays off over the years.
• Choose an instrument that feels comfortable in your hands, even if it costs a little more than your strict budget allows. A slightly pricier guitar you actually want to pick up will always beat a cheaper one that gathers dust.
• Learn the four basic open chords first. Once you can play G, C, D, and E minor cleanly, you can play hundreds of songs and start writing your own almost immediately.
• Don't wait until you feel ready to write your first song. Set a deadline, even a silly one, and force yourself to finish something, however rough.
• Record everything, even the messy voice memos. The imperfections often become the most genuine parts of a song, and you'll appreciate having a record of how you sounded at the beginning of the journey.
• Play in front of a friend or a small audience as soon as you can. The nerves fade faster than you think, and the encouragement you'll receive will keep you going through the harder weeks.

That first guitar is still sitting on a stand in the corner of my living room. The neck has warped a little, the bridge has been replaced twice, and the action is higher than it should be. None of that matters when I sit down to play, because every scratch on the body reminds me of the afternoon I walked into that Brunswick shop, the train ride that gave me the song, and the friends who helped me record it. If you've been thinking about starting, the only real piece of advice I can give is this: pick up the instrument, write the song, and share it before you feel ready. The rest of the journey reveals itself as you keep walking.