National guitar champion

When Tyler Grant was youth soccer age (an age I thought would never end), I used to harp on him about moving his feet. He had very slow feet.

It would be years before I realized I was watching the wrong parts. If I wanted fast, I should have been watching his hands. Those were the hands that last Saturday picked up a guitar at the National Flatpicking Guitar Championships, and when they set the guitar down again, Tyler had won first prize. There were 32 contestants. He was awarded $2,000 and a guitar of his choice. He chose a Collings, hand-made by a company in Austin.

I figured he chose the Collings because he had a space in the Collings Room for it. He must have rooms for all the guitars he has won – the Martin Room, the Gibson Room, etc. Me? I am making room in the Pride and Envy corners of my head to allow for the kind of swelling created by the news that your kid is the National Flatpicking Guitar Champion of the United States of America.

Many fathers can take credit for guiding or coaching or inspiring their kids to this sort of success, and I feel highly motivated to try. We do have a guitar connection, but it is a flimsy one. I have been crashing through three-chord progressions since I was 12 or 13 and wanted to copy the rock and roll that overnight had started pouring out of the radio. I learned a few Elvis songs and a few Johnny Cash songs, establishing a repertoire that has changed hardly at all to this day. I tried to play the guitar licks between verses, but my hands were as fast as Tyler’s feet would someday be, and I gave that up and just stuck to the chords.

So Tyler heard his dad play guitar from the time he was born, and he may have been inspired by the sound, or by staring through the bars of his crib, thinking somebody really needed to teach me how to play that thing, and it might as well be him, someday. I do know that on Tyler’s MySpace page, he lists me fourth among the people who have inspired him, behind Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, Jerry Garcia, and David Grier.
That is pride enough for me. I think the inspiration that brought Tyler to becoming a guitar champion started the same place that mine did, listening to music he liked. When he heard bluegrass, he knew what he wanted to do. Then he did the work.

It has been a lot of work. Tyler started when he was 16 or 17. Now he is 32. He has degrees from Grossmont College and California University of the Arts. He knows music theory. He plays classical guitar. He practices three or four hours a day. One day years ago he was playing and I asked him what the tune was. “Just notes,” he said. He was practicing what he called a pentatonic scale. Sounded like music to me.

I have watched Tyler’s hands through these years. They weren’t nearly as fast in the beginning. About a year ago, I heard him reach a fluidity that gives the impression that playing the guitar isn’t work at all. The reward for all the work is that playing starts to sound easy. When I hear Tyler playing on a CD, I see his fingers on the strings, and that connection is a gift for a lifetime. There is a very good photo of him at his sister’s Website at oliveme.wordpress.com. You will also find there a very good summation of the winning ways that Tyler brought to the stage with him last Saturday.