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.

Most of my practice time has been spent on learning how to read sheet music while playing — not something that is coming easy for me. Thus far, I’ve worked my way up to the D string (from high E). It has taken me about four weeks to get to there. In retrospect, I think that is terrible… I wish I had gotten further faster…

Anyway, tonight after I finished going over about 45 minutes worth of note reading practice and some finger work [this exercise] I spent time looking at barred chords. Right now, as I write this my left hand is hurting me… I really worked the barred chord. I spent about 10 minutes playing a Bm, A, G, Em progression.

After which I started playing a A, G and then a D, C progression. I was playing these using the following chords.

I believe that this is good barred chord practice. Using the A, G progress as an example I was playing:

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4/4 A / / / | / / / / | G / / / | / / / /|
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Repeat that 4 times and then play the same rhythm for D, C progression.

Over at  “A Guitar Teacher’s Lesson Notebook” (a blog), Robs interpreted and published chords and rhythms (strum patterns) to a bunch of songs:

http://www.heartwoodguitar.com/WordPressBlog/?p=103

Some of the songs include

• Barenaked Ladies – If I Had a Million Dollars
• Johnny Cash – Ring of Fire
• The Raconteurs – Steady As She Goes
• Many more!

It is important, in my opinion for beginning guitar players to properly understand time and rhythm as that is arguably the foundation of music.

A little bit ago, I stumbled upon this blog post and video by Mark Wein, the author of “Foundations for Guitar“. I wanted to share it. If you’ve not spend much (or any!) time studying and learning how time works within the world of music, I’d like to make a friendly suggestion that view the video and check out the post.

http://blog.markwein.com/2008/08/28/time-and-rhythm.aspx

A while ago, I started writing a post on Let Her Cry by Hootie and the Blowfish. I never finished it but I decided to re-write and publish it.

I love the Hootie song “Let Her Cry” and it’s actually fairly easy to play. I’ve been able to play every part but I’ve never fully put it together. I just don’t have the confidence to play it. But I wanted to share it with others out there as you might want to give it a try.

Following are web sites that have published the chords and rhythm for the song. Give the song a try:

• http://www.guitaretab.com/h/hootie-and-the-blowfish/8545.html
• http://www.ibreathemusic.com/forums/showthread.php?p=88626

Update: Here is the Music Video for this song from YouTube

As I said in a previous post, for scale practice, I’m working on learning the box pattern.

After going back and forth a little bit with Kenski (The Fillmore Five Project), I think I understand what the “Box Pattern” is. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to try to explain it right now, as I don’t think I could write something that in depth — and its not even a complicated topic…

Anyway, I’ve been learning the Box Pattern as defined here: http://www.myguitarsolo.com/sc_box.htm

I’ve already got the Pentatonic scale down; no problems there but I needed to do some work on the Dorian scale as MyGuitarSolo.com has it defined. I think I have it down, but I created some TuxGuitar files to practice with (for rhythm and timing practice).

I’ve placed the TuxGuitar files for download below:

• A Pentatonic (Minor) TuxGuitar File
• A Dorian TuxGuitar File

The source, MyGuitarSolo.com, has the scales written out in a way to show you which notes on the fret board to play, they do not show an order or direction to play the notes in. The TuxGuitar files are my interpretation of what order to play the notes. (Of course, it doesn’t really matter what order you play the notes in and if you are not familar with what I’m talking about keep an eye out here — much more will be coming about this topic).

Below are images of the TuxGuitar files (click to enlarge):

A Pentatonic (Minor)

A Dorian

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…

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?

There is so much that I want to post and want to do but I can never find the time… Time just keeps slipping away and time keeps going, never stopping.

At some point, I will get in to the rhythm and will consistently post what I want to post to this site. Until then, I’m sorry…  I’m sorry to you but I’m also sorry to myself…

There’s been so much content I’ve wanted to post and so much that I never got around to that I eventually forgot about…

Shoot…

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:

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Recording 2:

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Recording 3:

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