Edgar Jorge, a student from Woodland Regional, is also a guitarist that has caught the eyes of students and staff. He has participated in the Guitarist Battle of 2023 reaching second place, and last year, where Jorge competed against other guitarists such as Riley Mena, Logan Johnson, Luke Cybulski, and Wyatt Finley.

Jorge got introduced to guitars before his freshman year at Woodland when one of his friends, who had parents that were Jorge’s neighbors, wanted to have a band. His friend played the guitar, Jorge’s brother played drums, and Jorge’s friend’s brother wanted to sing. Jorge ended up doing the bass guitar.

Bass supports the really deep and low sounds because the four thick strings that a bass guitar has makes.

“I like that the instrument I picked up is used in all the music that I like,” said Jorge. “It’s really just been from family and friends to the music I [was] surrounded with.”

He did some research on learning bass and knowing influential players that have made an impact on bass.

“I believe one of my strengths for the skill level I’m at [is] slap bass,” said Jorge.

The slap bass technique is used when your thumb is aligned to a string, and you hit it to create a sound. There are different skills such as plucking, which is pulling the strings by using your pointer finger, middle finger, or fourth finger.

“Something I want to improve is my musical knowledge in general,” said Jorge

He wants to expand with what he knows, and improve such as reading new music and playing some notes while recognizing what each note is.

“YouTube is a great resource of musical knowledge,” said Jorge. “There’s videos for any question you have about music on there.”

In addition, Jorge finds Johnson cool and fun to hang out with. He admires his knowledge in music, as Logan talks about keys and chords that Jorge is still learning.

“If you’re trying to be a really good guitar player, you’re going to hate the guitar at some point because you’re just going to be messing up,” said Jorge. “You’re just going to get so angry at it because there’s just one part [of a song] that’s just way too tricky.”

He is also in a band called Artemis that focuses on heavy metal music with Wyatt Finley, Alex Luddy, and Nate Kibbe.

Jorge wants everyone who is interested in guitars or any other instrument to not give up, as he believes that learning music has a high learning curve at the beginning, but gets easier as you put in the effort.

“It’s like dominos, once you understand one thing, you just start to understand all these other things that you’ve heard of that you never used to know or never used to understand.”

Edit: additional information added about the Artemis band.