Understanding Guitar

One Beginners’ Efforts

Now these guys are creative:

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:

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…

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.

Note: if you read this site from an RSS Reader (such as Google Reader) you many not be able to see the MP3 players above. Please click here to listen to the three recordings.

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.

IG’s latest post was about a study where a scientist found that if one practices something for 2 hours a day for 10 years (including weekends) then you’ll be very good at it.

If we apply this to guitar and if you start today, you should be a guitar superstar by 5/7/2018.

Of course (and I’m sorry) that just isn’t going to happen. A lot more goes in to becoming a superstar than just being a good guitarist. I feel that charisma plus the style of music you enjoy playing as well as many other things factor in to super stardom. However, I would not expect that to deter you from trying. If you don’t try, you will only regret it.

However, I’ve wondered off the point of this post. The question I have to the readers / contributors out there is what is your practice routine?

In my pursuit of learning guitar, I’ve come across many recommendations for practice routines.

Some of the recommendations that I’ve heard include things like “always practice for a set amount of time” and / or “at a specific time in the day”. The goal is to make the practice a routine in your day. And while I have tried to apply the idea, the reality of where my time can go is never cohesive to such a practice schedule… As a kid, that might be possible; however as an adult I do not believe it is.

For me my first goal is to make sure that I at least get some practice in each day. Even as little as 10 minutes before going to bed. (Such as yesterday, in which I spent most of my time trying to fix my wife’s New Dell laptop.)

Aside from the 10 minutes, if I have more time I include chord drills — Currently Bm with rhythm and strumming drills. I’ve not found the time to practice an actual song for a while. I need to find time to work on that.

So again, what is your practice routine? What do you spend time on and do you have any suggestions for the guitar-learning-public out there from your trials and tribulations?

So I’ve always liked the Jaws theme… I’m pretty sure that most people (over 18) are familiar with this little tune.  Now, when I say tune I’m talking specificity about the trademark lead introduction piece; not the entire thing… I’m not even sure that there is an entire thing… Besides the point right now…

Anyway, I put together some music tabs for the song / introduction - this was done quickly and may not be perfect, but my wife said it sounded right…  So enjoy!

• Jaws Theme as TuxGuitar File
• Jaws Theme as PDF File

If you set up your TuxGuitar properly (you need a soundbank installed in to Java) you can have TuxGuitar play it for you — and you can practice with TuxGuitar.

Here is a YouTube video that I found with the theme in case you want to hear the ‘Real’ version or if you have no clue as to what I’m talking about:

Play this for two minutes (not 99 as the music says), it will exercise your fretting hand and your picking hand much. (Click Image for a larger Rendering).

After you try this, please post a comment on what you think. Was it hard? Was it easy? Does your hand hurt too much to leave a comment?

As some might know, I’ve been slowly working on a song for my wife. It is something I’ve always wanted to do and so I decided to start sooner rather than later. Some might say I’m rushing things, but it helps me learn, so what the heck!

With that said, I’ve written the first chord progression for the song. I figure I’m going to keep building on it and modifying it until I feel it sounds good.

I made three recordings, and I will be honest — each of the recording contains mistakes in one way or another. Originally I was only going to post one of them, but I thought “why not post all of them.”  I’ll just put myself out there.  I’m not really sure which one is the best or closest to what I want but If I had to guess I’d say recording two or three…

Recording 1:

Recording 2:

Recording 3:

As a beginner / intermediate guitarist, I’m always looking for tools to help teach me more than Chord diagrams could teach me.

The poster mentioned at the link below is of extrem interest to me. Rythm guitar can be challenging and while I’ve learned the concepts, I’m not sure I’m applying them correctly.

I’m gonna try to grab myself one of these posters. You might want to take a look at it yourself.

http://news.harmony-central.com/Newp/2008/KRM-Rhythm-Guitar-Poster.html

Image Courtesy of Harmoney Central

On Jan 26th, I wrote about my efforts and troubles learning how to play the Bm chord. I found another video posted by another blogger about the chord. I wanted to share it because we’ve received a large response from the internet population on the topic… Apparently, I’m not the only one having difficulties with the chord!

This video not only includes the Bm I wrote about earlier, but it shows several other valid methods of playing the chord. Though, I do believe the barred method is the “preferred” method in the guitar world.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve spent any amount of time reading some of my post here at UnderstandingGuitar.org, you’ve no doubt read that I have a tendency to really push the use of a metronome for a beginner guitarist as a beginning guitarist.

The reason mostly has to do with the fact that when I first picked up a guitar, I didn’t know what a metronome was, and more importantly I didn’t like them and hence didn’t want to buy one and/or “waste time” using one.

I’ve, obviously, since learned what a metronome is, and why a metronome is so vastly important. A very important part of music is that it deeply involves time. A metronome helps you keep track of time accurately. When you listen to a song, you may not think about it but the space (or time) between each note is a characteristic of the song.

When first learning guitar, it is important (in my opinion) to incorporate this in to your practice early on and to simply get used to the aspect of time from the get-go. It sounds easy enough. But to keep a steady beat does take another aspect of attention. Mix this focus with the fact that you are focusing on which strings to hit plus where to fret each string and it gets hard - particularly for a beginner. It all adds up…

The Tool

So now that I’ve given yet another rant on metronomes, here is a neat web site that I found:

http://www.metronomeonline.com/

It is a online, flash-based metronome! The site also explains what a metronome is and how to use it. In addition, it give you details behind the Italian sounding words printed on some metronomes. I think it is all very good information.

Anyway, I thought this was a neat tool in case you don’t already have a metronome. Or perhaps, you just want to try a different metronome.

Enjoy!