Understanding Guitar

One Beginners’ Efforts

I was right! Guitar and music in general does reduce one’s stress! Check out the article at Dy-sphoric:

http://dy-sphoric.blogspot.com/2008/12/guitar-music-and-stress.html

I’ve been trying to do this write-up for a while, but have not had time — Work is busy and I’m trying to spend my “guitar-time” with a guitar rather than a keyboard.

However, I have some time now so I thought I’d throw something together. Forgive me for the brevity of this write-up.

In short, the lesson was good. As I told my wife, the instructor didn’t show me anything groundbreaking or awe-inspiring. He gave me some tips on learning to quickly fret the Bm chord. And then, of course, he needed to figure out where I was and where he should pick up.

I highly stressed that I wanted to include lots of music-reading in my guitar education; this was a point of contention with my last instructor as he was not very good at reading music-notation (his admission).

My “homework” was to learn the open-position notes on the guitar without regards to how to read the notes. I’ve just learned which note is which on the guitar neck within the first three frets. Not hard to do, but it did take a little bit of work.

Below is an diagram of those notes:

I’ve done a little bit of self-learning on reading music notation. I’ve found that memorizing the notes on the guitar neck has made it easier to learn to read music. I’d have never thought, but it did.

Anyway, that is it for now. I mentioned that the instructor gave me tips on learning the Bm chord. I will post more about that later.

I’ve been traveling for work as we are migrating projects to different offices. I don’t travel often, so it was interesting to me.

I was on the road on Friday, and then again Monday to Tuesday. All that time I’ve been away from the guitar. In a way, I felt that I needed a bit of a break from guitar. I had pushed myself and followed through on the exercises but some days I probably did more then I should have.

Over the weekend, during the time that I did have here at home I went to the Gym to get a little stress relieving weight-lifting in. I was flipping through a weight-training magazine between weight sets and either an article or advertisement reminded me that you should put a day between the days that you weight lift.  I’ve been doing weights training since high school, so this is not new information to me.

Perhaps we should look at this information in regards to learning guitar. The work that you do with you fretting hand is, in a way, similar to cardiovascular exercises. However, there are exceptions to this. Certain chords you learn, in particular barred chords, can be more like an intense weight lifting regimen. Keep in mind, that I’ve been “drilling” the Bm and F chords after reading the article in Acoustic Guitar magazine.

I felt that being on the road for those three days have given my hand the break that it needed in order to build up some muscle. I’m really not sure if this has any validity to it (in regards to learning guitar), but the theory seems sound.

I do need to give my hand a day or two to re-develop some of the dexterity that I had built up but hopefully barred chords will continue to get easier; they have been getting easier for the past couple of weeks.

On November 14^th, I posted a couple of other chord combinations to practice. While having the chords are nice, I wanted to illustrate them via rhythm slashes.

Below are the three rhythm slash combinations. Click on the images to view the entire image.

1. Em Am – rhythm slashes with the chord voicings.

 

2. Am Dm – rhythm slashes with chord voicings

 

3. D A – rhythm slashes with chord voicings.

All of these should be excellent rhythm practice and will help you with your chord formation.

As you are going through these, the goal is to play them cleanly – not fast! Right now, speed shouldn’t matter to you. What matters is whether strings ringing clearly/cleanly. I know that this was a big issue for me when I was really first starting – it was downright aggravating at times.

I found, that when I was having trouble with the chords ringing clearly that just playing them over and over did help overall. Also, slow down and really pay attention to what is going on. If you really can never get a chord to come out right; stop and really look at what the problem is. Once you realize what the problem is, correct it and then practice re-forming the chord [playing it cleanly] and just that chord over and over. Once you’ve done that a few times, go back to the patterns above.

Although, as I’ve stressed before, it is important to do these, and any music practice against a metronome. It is very important to develop your ability to track time and I think that it is easier to do that when you are starting then after.