Understanding Guitar

One Beginners’ Efforts

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while and I’ve just kept getting pulled away. I’ve completed my lessons at the Music Room and I thought things went well. I spend a lot of time with guitar during this time and actually learned things!

As you might recall from previous posts, I decided to stop attending lessons at the music room because of the amount of time I felt I had to put in to each week to ensure I learned what I was suppose to learn. Ultimately, it left me absolutely no time for all the other things that I had going on. I guess this is the hard part of being an adult learning something like an instrument.

Desire just isn’t enough because that desire needs to be stronger than what you need to sacrifice and for me I was sacrificing too much. Of course, I’m am planning on continuing with the guitar. I will, but I’ve vastly slowed the pace. I doubt I’ll ever be able to play like I wanted to but ultimately, I knew I’d never get there because I tend to be a perfectionist.

I imagine that being a perfectionist has also hindered my ability to play because if I cant nail something perfectly, consistently I keep on it. I wear myself out in this way because I either get tired or frustrated with what I’m practicing.

Anyway, my teacher gave me a few tips for continue to practice. One thing that I wanted to make sure that I post here is that I discussed rhythm guitar with my teacher. Rhythm guitar is a very versatile thing which is why I wanted to cover it. Any time you hear someone solo in a bar or what not, 90 percent of the time they are playing the rhythm part of the song (occasionally filling in with the popular riffs and etc.)

My rhythm guitar sucks. I know it has gotten better since I first started this effort, but it still sucks. I can’t keep time and I have trouble maintaining a pattern. All very frustrating.

My teacher suggested a book called “Winning Rhythm“. I hope to evetually pick this book up and work though it.

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?

As I announced…

…a while back (see blog post), I decided to “start over” as it were. I felt that my practice wasn’t going anywhere and that I needed to reestablish my learning pattern. In my “re-effort” (is that a word?) I eventually stumbled upon (and blogged several times) about GuitarCardio.com.

This site eventually lead me to start researching scales and that presented the question “what was the most effective scale or group of scales to learn”. I eventually came upon something called “the box position.”

What I learned about the box position, to my surprise, is that it was not a set of scale patterns that one learns. It appears to be a description of playing within a single position. That single position doesn’t necessarily need to be the same pattern nor the same type of scale.

For example, the A Pentatonic Major scale in three different positions would be playing in the box position. Additionally, so would playing the A Pentatonic Major scale in 5th position and then the A Pentatonic Minor scale in 5th position.

The Box Position

I spent time researching and trying to understand what exactly is meant by “The Box Position” (a.k.a “The Box Pattern”). My conclusions is rather simple and straight forward.

There is not a fixed set of scales that make up the box pattern; every source or book can (and will) have their own method and scales. Take, for example, the link I’ve provided before on this topic previously: http://www.myguitarsolo.com/sc_box.htm

Their method of presenting the box position includes learning six scales in a specific order (I’m not yet sure if there is significance to the order); while another source, a book this time, shows the box pattern in all Pentatonic scales in different positions on the neck.

Both seem valid, and I have no reason to believe otherwise. That plus in all my research, I’ve not found consistent presentations of the box pattern. This lead me to the conclusion that there is no fix set of scales to make up the box pattern.

The Box Position using The Pentatonic Scale

I was in a bookstore looking to pick up a reference book on guitar scales. I stumbled upon a book titled “Practical Pentatonics” by Askold Buk. It is a small 44 page book about how flexible the Pentatonic scales can be and what can be done if applied, umm, creatively.

Now, obviously, due to copyright laws ( ) I can’t give away or post any of the examples they have in the book. That isn’t the point of the post, anyway. I want to share, in my own words, what I’ve learned and discovered from this book. Of course, if you become interested in this topic, I’d encourage you to purchase this book or a book like it (though, I’ve not found others like it).

Examples

Below are some basic examples. First, I’m going to start out with a basic Pentatonic Minor Scale in the key of A. [If you can not see the rest of the post, please view the post on UnderstandingGuitar.org. Most RSS readers will not display the following content properly.]

Read the rest of this entry »

I was at a Sam Ash^ about 2 weeks ago, shopping around — just looking (at saxophones [the bug is gone]) and I came upon something that really interested me.

It was a small CD (Jewel) case which said “Learn to play this Hit Song!” It was in a display box with several titles named. I scanned through the titles and discovered that they labeled the level of skill required to play the given song…

So I scanned through looking for items marked at “Guitar_Level 1″ which is the lowest level. I ended up with only a handful of selections (like 2 or 3) and all but 1 was of no interest of me (as far as learning the song). That was “Smells like Teen Spirit” as performed by Nirvana.

I decided immediately to purchase it; I had to at least give it a try and it was only around $13.00.

You can find more information about this here: http://www.playitnowtunes.com^

My first impressions when I broke in to the CD and started to listening was positive. However, I don’t like their version of the song (Smells Like Teen Spirit) but that just probably has to do with the fact that I have always much preferred their acoustic or unplugged versions more then the electric (plugged?) versions.

I’ve only been working with it for two weeks. I don’t want to post a “this will work” or “this won’t work” opinion until I’ve spent more time with it; but I did want to let the world know that it was out there.

Now these guys are creative:

I’ve decide to take “learning” guitar in a different direction. I’ve been thinking about my previous post and decided that I want to focus a bit more on the basics of reading music and playing sheet music. While learning to play music like Staind, Cold, Tool, etc. is what I ultimately strive for, I think that I will only get there if I build a good base by starting with basic sheet music.

Given this I was hoping to get recommendation on different books that cover introducing playing guitar.  I don’t want something too simple but not too hard either. After all, I need to rebuild my hands up as it has been a while since I was playing.

Currently, I’ve got a couple of books including “Guitar for Dummies”, a book titled something like “Guitar for Beginners: The Fender Method” and a Mel Brooks [??] book.  But there are a lot of different books out there, all with a different method of doing things.

If you used one and would like to recommend it, please post it’s title (and if possible author) below. I would greatly appreciate it and it would be interesting to hear what people have tried. Likewise, if you tried to use a book and it didn’t help you or it was frustrating to read/utilize please post that too. What is bad is just as important as what is good.

Thank you

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

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

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.

MusicMoose.org is an interesting yet potentially helpful learn-to-play resource. I call it a learn-to-play resource because they cover a lot of instruments, including guitar, saxophone, and banjo (among many others).

I’ve not spent a significant amount of time bouncing around their site, let alone trying some of their material. However, for the few minutes that I spent looking at the site, I felt it was worth a mention.

For guitarist they have several lessons all further classified. See categories just above the search results for the different classifications.

My wife and I are leaving for Las Vegas soon — It’s a sort of mini-vacation for us. We don’t gamble at all, but we love shows and we’ve never seen the strip. It should be fun.

What I actually wanted to write about was something that my wife and I were talking about last night. She was explaining some of her adventures in to the world of Tarot, an interest she’s had since High School and she told me that as she learns about it, there is more that she realizes that she needs to learn.

I found this true with the Guitar too… The more I learn, the more I realize that I don’t know about playing guitar or writing music. No matter how much I learn there is always more to learn.

And I guess that is what makes the Guitar such a great hobby. Not only is it a never-ending learning experience, but it can also follow the path of interest. You can always back track later…

Have you ever read the Choose Your Own Adventure books? It is sort of like that, but never-ending…