Understanding Guitar

One Beginners’ Efforts

I’ve been trying to do this write-up for a while, but have not had time — Work is busy and I’m trying to spend my “guitar-time” with a guitar rather than a keyboard.

However, I have some time now so I thought I’d throw something together. Forgive me for the brevity of this write-up.

In short, the lesson was good. As I told my wife, the instructor didn’t show me anything groundbreaking or awe-inspiring. He gave me some tips on learning to quickly fret the Bm chord. And then, of course, he needed to figure out where I was and where he should pick up.

I highly stressed that I wanted to include lots of music-reading in my guitar education; this was a point of contention with my last instructor as he was not very good at reading music-notation (his admission).

My “homework” was to learn the open-position notes on the guitar without regards to how to read the notes. I’ve just learned which note is which on the guitar neck within the first three frets. Not hard to do, but it did take a little bit of work.

Below is an diagram of those notes:

I’ve done a little bit of self-learning on reading music notation. I’ve found that memorizing the notes on the guitar neck has made it easier to learn to read music. I’d have never thought, but it did.

Anyway, that is it for now. I mentioned that the instructor gave me tips on learning the Bm chord. I will post more about that later.

I was listening to David Gilmore’s live album “Live in Gdansk” and I came to a conclusion. Some will know this, some may have never considered it.

Guitar isn’t about how fast you can “fret-n-pluck”. Guitar [sub any musical instrument] is about control. Hitting the right notes at the right time (right time = staying in time).

To some, this might seem like an obvious conclusion but when begining guitar it is easy to get caught up in the desire for “speed” or even “sound” or “tone.”

If you’ve followed this blog last winter, you might have know that I had been taking guitar lessons and at some point, decided to discontinue lessons. At that time, I had decided that for a mix of reasons.

About a week ago, I stumbled upon a music store called “The Music Room.” I was, as my wife will attest, very excited. Why the excitement? Well, because The Music Room is what I consider a real music store. Their retail store isn’t filled with thousands of guitar hanging on the wall with Amps plugged in and turned up. No, no. They, in my opinion, focus on actually playing the instrument (and many more types of instruments).

They have professional music teachers which is what I’ve been looking for. Their teachers have professional education in music from major universities, furthermore this is what they do for a living — teach music to others. (I’m sure they gig and play elsewhere but you get the idea).

I’ve signed up for lessons and am anxiously waiting for my first lesson. My self-teaching method simply doesn’t work. It is too unfocused and I don’t stick to a regular schedule, nor do I know when to push forward or keep practicing something when I’m stuck.

I suspect working with a teacher will solve problems like this.

I must mention that when I stopped in to sign up for lessons, the gentlemen who helped me left me with a great impression of the place. He was patient and answered all my questions. The shop is clean and obviously geared toward learn to play music; not to push gear out the door. Anyway, like I said — So far, I’m very impressed and have high hopes!

I’ve spent time working on a MS Windows program that I will eventually release as open source. The program isn’t spectacular — it is a hierarchical ToDo list. This means that you can have sub-tasks. I like this type of tool while I work (as a programmer).

Anyway, it got me thinking about something… Millions and millions of programmers work on open source software software each day. Some of the most notable open-source products include (but are not limited to) FireFox (the web browser) and OpenOffice (A Microsoft Office Compatible Office suite). These two programs, I imagine, have hundreds of people working on them; thousands of programmers are willing to work on free products. Given this, then why isn’t there free music? There should be thousands of free songs!

Perhaps there is? Perhaps I’m not looking in the right place? Either way, it probably isn’t wildly known else I’d have stumbled upon it by now…

I wrote my aforementioned program as a practice piece. Something to hone certain skills and to see what I could produce. I guess what I’m trying to ask is: do musician or bands create and record songs and release them for free for the same purpose? Or perhaps with the idea of getting feedback from the public in order to improve or perhaps just to hear how one sounds on a recorded and mixed song?

I know that Jonathan Coulton did something like this. He spent, I believe, a year releasing a song a week on his blog for free. You can still download those songs.

Do you do things like this?

I suppose some people do this on YouTube, doing covers and stuff. But I’m looking specificity at original material?