Understanding Guitar

One Beginners’ Efforts

It is not new news to the Internet that America’s obesity rates are high — from what I understand, they are higher then most (dare I say, all?) other countries.

There is one “tip” that I’ve heard time and time again to loose weight and get fit is to not find a “close” parking spot. Instead park in the back of the parking lot where there is a ton of open space and plenty of room. From there, you hoof it to the building. I’ve read many different estimates but the experts say that doing this consistently for every where you go — for every trip will result in consistent exercise and also weight lost (eventually).

I look at this tip in this way: Don’t take shortcuts. Just park your car in the parking lot and from there walk to where you need to go. In the cities, you don’t necessarily get to drive directly to where you need to be! And people in the downtown cities who walk every tend to be healthier*.

I think that this logic can be applied to almost anything. It can be applied to learning guitar and it can be applied to your professional life or to something as simple as your house work.

How might you apply this logic in your guitar practice routine(s)?

Also, have you seen shortcut type solutions to learning guitar?

*=My assumetion. No research or other article supports this in anyway. In fact, I could be wrong but don’t tell anyone.

Check out this article: http://www.guitarnoise.com/article.php?id=542

The article covers things like Scales, Power Chords and Double stops.

I was messing around with my POD 2.0 By Line6 (I just bought it, I’ve not posted about it yet. I will post about it soon) and I came up with a sort of “trippy” (according to my wife) little rhythm piece.

You can listen to it below:

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Note: if you can’t see the player, you should view the original post.

The guitar is an amplified acoustic guitar put through a Line6 POD 2.0 with the “9d” setting selected (on the POD) captured with a Zoom H2. All of this combined is creating this sort of delay – reverb – acoustic type sound…

Back when I started guitar, I read quite a bit of material. I hadn’t started this blog yet and the idea of going to a blog for “help” hadn’t yet crossed my mind.

But, I started self-teaching myself with books and I eventually looked up a guitar instructor local to my area. Of all the time I spent reading books and working with the instructor, I don’t think I was ever directly told what I’m about to post here… And it is kind of a shame – it might have saved some frustration. (But to be fair, I do realize that my instructor indirectly told me this.)

Learning guitar is not just about “learning” the guitar. You need to build up muscles, dexterity, calluses and coordination (among other things). At first, certain patterns or chords will seem impossible until you’ve actually spent a significant amount of time with a guitar building up your hands. It simply takes repetition and a lot of patience and practice.

When you first sit down with a guitar and you look at a chord diagram for (example) Em (Diagram to the right), it appears to be a fairly simple chord to play. But as a beginner, your finger tips are soft because you haven’t earned your calluses yet. Playing this simple chord at first without calluses can actually be hard.

Why? This seems like a very simple chord, why might a beginner have trouble with this chord? Because the tips of your fingers are so soft, the strings will sink in to the flesh and cause the sides of your fingers to touch a sounding string. I’ve discovered that this problem has more or less gone away (or at least decreased) as I’ve started to develop early calluses.

Of course, some of this has to do with learning to position your fingers properly, which is another factor in solving this problem. I felt that I was lead to believe that finger positioning was my only issue. This was only half right and it wasn’t until recently that I actually fully realized this.

The same type of thing is true for things like barred chords (strength) and other types of more complex chords (dexterity).

Of course, you can only build up strength, dexterity, calluses and coordination by practicing – so go practice. But have patience and when you can’t play something or a certain chord, don’t fully accept that you “can’t” do it — accept that you may need to develop further yet; but don’t let that be a reason to not practice what you’ve been having trouble with… You can only further yourself if you practice what you can’t do, not what you can do.

IG of IG Blog pointed out that (at the time of his writing) “five guitar lesson podcasts are included in the current list of top 20 podcasts.” While this is interesting information unto itself, it does point out that iTunes and podcasts are quickly becoming a worthwhile resource to consult when looking for Learn-Guitar material.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the concept of a podcast, it is similar to a radio segment but it is pre-recorded and distributed through the internet. Some people (including myself) also consider them a type of “recorded blog.” In case you are not familiar with the concept of a blog, you are reading one.

If you have iTunes installed on your computer, you can subscribe to these podcasts and then listen to them from your computer. Furthermore, if you have a iPod you can then sync iTunes and the iPod and listen to the podcast on your hand held iPod.

Returning to the topic of podcasts as a Learn-Guitar aid: One problem that you might face when it comes to using these free Podcast is, you basically get what you pay for. Keep in mind that this isn’t always the case but also, that they are free… However, as the five on the top twenty are tributes to, there are good ones out there. You may just need to try a few to find one that fits you. I’d suggest that you start with the podcasts on the top twenty list.

I’ve listened to a few but don’t really have any to recommend at this time. Of course, if I ever find one I’d shurely pass it on. (Oh, and I’ve not checked out the aforementioned podcasts yet.)

A while back, I posted that I wanted a “Epiphone Les Paul Ultra-II Electric Guitar.” You can find that post here: http://www.understandingguitar.org/2008/05/01/i-want-one/

I wanted to share that I’ve stumbled upon some more information about the guitar. It appears that Harmony Central (I tend to follow their news) also has a section of their site dedicated to product reviews…

They have a ton of reviews of everything from guitar, to amps, to who knows what. Obviously, the first thing I wanted to check reviews for was the Les Paul Ultra-II. I found it rather easily within their pages.

The reviews are all positive, but there are only two reviews. I was hoping for a lot more. Still, the two reviews are both positive. Both reviews are not “Perfect 10s” indicating that the authors put some though in to the reviews, but both reviews average about 8.5 (out of 10).

You can find the reviews here: http://reviews.harmony-central.com/reviews/Guitar/product/Epiphone/Les+Paul+Ultra-II/10/1

I’ve been traveling for work as we are migrating projects to different offices. I don’t travel often, so it was interesting to me.

I was on the road on Friday, and then again Monday to Tuesday. All that time I’ve been away from the guitar. In a way, I felt that I needed a bit of a break from guitar. I had pushed myself and followed through on the exercises but some days I probably did more then I should have.

Over the weekend, during the time that I did have here at home I went to the Gym to get a little stress relieving weight-lifting in. I was flipping through a weight-training magazine between weight sets and either an article or advertisement reminded me that you should put a day between the days that you weight lift.  I’ve been doing weights training since high school, so this is not new information to me.

Perhaps we should look at this information in regards to learning guitar. The work that you do with you fretting hand is, in a way, similar to cardiovascular exercises. However, there are exceptions to this. Certain chords you learn, in particular barred chords, can be more like an intense weight lifting regimen. Keep in mind, that I’ve been “drilling” the Bm and F chords after reading the article in Acoustic Guitar magazine.

I felt that being on the road for those three days have given my hand the break that it needed in order to build up some muscle. I’m really not sure if this has any validity to it (in regards to learning guitar), but the theory seems sound.

I do need to give my hand a day or two to re-develop some of the dexterity that I had built up but hopefully barred chords will continue to get easier; they have been getting easier for the past couple of weeks.

A few days ago, I made some recordings with the intention of posting them here. I came up with a quick chord progression while practicing Bm.

Actually, I didn’t really come up with the progression. The progression is Bm, A, G, Em which are the chords for Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd as written here. It is the strumming that I “created” which I liked quite a bit. So I grabbed my Zoom H2 and recorded it.

I can’t play it perfectly. The reason I came up with it was because I’ve been trying to practice the Bm chord. I can play it, I just need to be able to switch to it faster.

Here are the recordings.

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You can hear the “dead” chords that I’m playing after some of the chord changes. That is when I’m trying to go back to Bm. It doesn’t work always, but I did get a few in there. Just getting a few of those changes was a major accomplishment for me. The recordings aren’t perfect, but I’m still working on it. I will try to post more when I feel the chord transisitions are better.

Are you familiar with the Song “Handlebars” by the flobots? If you aren’t, I’ve posted it below:

The reason I’m mentioning this song is because, first, I love it. I don’t know why, but I’m addicted to it. I love the trumpet solo that is in the song.

A local radio station, Q101.1, here in Chicago created a parody of the song called C Section Scars. While whether the song is tasteful can be debated I think it is funny and worth sharing… Listen to it below:

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If you’d like to download it, you can get it from: http://www.q101.com/airstaff/shermanandtingle.aspx

If you don’t always follow the comments on this site, I wanted to summarize what I learned about MusicianUniversity.com.

On April 19th, I posted a request for information on MusicianUniversity.com which offers music courses for musicians. I was interested in taking thier songwriting course.

“tsubibo” left a comment on my this site. He pointed me to a link which provided third-party insight in to the company. Of course, this information is one sided however it also showed the level of customer service…

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080415072326AADYEej

This isn’t to say that they are a bad company or the courses are bad (because it is only one posting from one previous customer), but I’d rather not take the risk of losing my money and not getting anything out of it.

tsubibo also mentioned that several people were asking for information about other peoples’ experience (like my post) however, they never found a solid description of someone experience.

The question above plus the fact that nobody mentioned any experience leads me to believe that I should probably shy away from them for now.

However, if you have had or eventually have an interaction with MusicanUniversity.com, please share your story. Leave a comment on either this post or the other post.