Understanding Guitar

One Beginners’ Efforts

As I said in one of my later posts, I’ve taken a new direction - a new focus if you will. I’ve been following along with the book “Mel Bay’s Modern Guitar Method Grade 1,” playing the pieces and learning things in the order the book suggests.

Currently, I’m practicing on the the E note, F note and G note on the first string and the B note, C note, D note on the second string. I’m playing a few pieces from the book trying to practice my accuracy as well as my ability to read music (which, to me, is one key in this new quest).

As I was playing the first couple of songs (if I can call them that) from the book, I wasn’t sure if they were sounding like the should. I know that I was following the metronome properly, but I wasn’t sure if I was always hitting the right note at the right time. When you are first learning, so much is going on that it can be hard to ensure it sounds right… How can you tell [if sounds right] when the music is on paper?!

I remembered that I have a tabbing / music notation software called TuxGuitar (The team recently released version 1.0) which will actually play what I tab out. Now, at first, this might seem kind of stupid, but I swear it is working — it is helping.

The computer will always hit the right note at the right time. It is almost liking playing with another guitarist, but one that will never come out of time or make a mistake. Basically, like it is politely correcting you. Furthermore, as I’m playing along with the software I can listen to the notes that are played, and I instantly know via comparison if I’ve just played the correct note or not. When I play the wrong note, I can stop and figure out what the correct note is and work through the mistake.

Below are a couple of the songs that I’ve been playing in the TuxGuitar 1.0 format. You can give it a try.

Frolic - TuxGuitar 1.0 File

E - B - TuxGuitar 1.0 File

I was reading PickStroke.com and on their side bar the author had listed “Guitar Cardio” might be a good place to visit if you need to work on your speed.”

And boy, is PickStroke right!

I think this site (GuitarCardio) is an amazing idea. Kudos to the author for authoring and hosting this.

The site basically will generate a number of scales for you to run though, it give you several options. I hope to use the site to practice scales while working on my new direction.

Give it a try: http://www.guitarcardio.com/

Screen Shot:

A little bit ago, I posted about the fact that I wanted to go in a new direction; and I have since started.  I got a lot of good recommendations from different people and I appreciate everything everyone suggested.

However, as it turns out I didn’t actually go with any of them… at least not yet. I may revisit other material. For now, I’ve got a book called “Mel Bay’s Modern Guitar Method Grade 1.” I started flipping through it, and decided that this is where I’d start. I have a bunch of books, but for some reason I thought that this one suited me the best for now.

From this book, I’m basically trying to do everything right… I’m going through the exercises, I’m playing everything against a metronome and I’m ensuring that I’m playing the correct notes… Furthermore, this book only presents the material in standard music notations… Reading standard music notation is something else that I wanted to get out of learning guitar; my guitar teacher a while back wasn’t able to help me with that.

I will be focusing on material in this book as well as scales and of course, my quest to nail Bm which has been an “issue” for a while. I can play it better, but still can’t change to it quickly enough (for me).