Understanding Guitar

One Beginners’ Efforts

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…

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?

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