I had many false starts with guitar.

I’d tried to pick up the guitar when I was 7 - and learned a few chords.

Then I tried again when I was 12 - and learned a few songs.

But I really started playing when I was 15. The "spark" for me was seeing how a group of kids playing Smells Like Teen Spirit in the practice room in school.

It wasn't an assembly, they were just jamming. And they had the entire school watching them, and nodding along.

I thought it was the most epic thing ever.

I went home that day and dusted off the aul' guitar.

Then a few weeks later, I got my big "break". My dad, a musician, dropped out of his band, and they asked me if I could fill in to play bass. (We lived in a small village, so there weren't too many options...)

I had to learn 10 songs in 3 weeks on the bass.

Everyone else in the band was a college student, and a really good musician. So the impending doom of this gig made me come home and spend every night practicing for 5 hours.

Thing is, the gig actually went well. Everyone came up to me after saying, "that's sick you're a bass player" and so on...

And I was thinking what are you talking about. I felt like I was faking it. Putting on a musician "costume".

I thought this was going to be another false start. I didn't feel any different. But naturally, I got hooked. The crowd. The rush. The potential girls in my future.

I took that energy and learned guitar again. And what I'd do is sit on Youtube and pick the most difficult thing I could find. Like Drifting by Andy Mckee.

And I learned how to bash out these very technical tunes, so everyone was very impressed. I even got into a band!

But these annoying things kept happening...

People kept coming up to me and saying, "Hey we should jam"...

Or the band I was playing in wanted to record songs.

I had no idea what to do. If I was given 3 weeks to painstakingly work out the guitar part of a song, on my own, I could make it happen.

But I still didn't feel like a musician.

As a band, we actually got pretty good though. So we moved to London to hit the big time. The only issues was rent in London is more expensive than my mum's house. I had to pay the bills.

Teaching guitar was the obvious option.

I thought it'd be easy. Teaching people how to do the fun, advanced stuff - and yeah, there were a few of those students.

But the vast majority of people just wanted to learn the basics, and I couldn't do it because I'd skipped past them.