Look ma! I'm a rock star!

[bloobert]

I got my guitar! It has that woody new guitar smell. I like it. It's a Yamaha FG700S. Nothing fancy, but more than enough for these novice fingers and ears. When I moved to Oakville about ten years ago (hmmm, eleven actually...) I had a guitar and practiced because I didn't know anybody, and it was a thing I could do on my own. Now, my motivations

Comments

[bloobert]

I have practiced a little... I've learned so far that I forgot what little I once knew =) Not entirely, but some. However, I'm now able to play a bad F and fsus9? or something. I don't know what many chords are called. I need a beginner's class I think. I'd like to learn a little about notes and scales, and maybe finger picking. I just always used to strum with my thumb, so everything sounded horribly muted. But I liked the feeling of banging away. I'd like to be able to bang away with the pick, and not have it sound garish and obnoxious, like it does now.

As for playing everything I know, that's easy, because I don't know any songs =) I need to find a song or two I really like, and then practice playing that. I was trying to play along to Sarah Maclaughlin's World on Fire yesterday, and also Jimmy Rankin's Followed Her Around. I am not nearly fast enough yet! Or accurate, for that matter. But every now and then, when I hit the right chord at the right time, it feels really nice to be playing along, even if it only lasts a second or two... I had to stick to un-capo'ed songs, because in my excitement with buying a guitar, I forgot to get a capo :-/

I'm going to get together with my newbie guitar friend Jeff soon and we'll try and learn a song or two together I think. We may need to call in our friend Mike who actually knows how to play. He's been after me to get a guitar for awhile now. Should be fun!

I'd like to reach a point where I can pull out the thing at a cookout or something, and play well enough that people could recognize the song and sing along. That's my goal anyway =)

Oh, that reminds me, please post the tab to your songs on your site, so I can play along =)

[kamomil]

meh... tabs? it's mostly 3 chords... I can sit down & hash them out for you no prob. But if you want to try, they're mostly in the key of D, so D, G and A. Lies is in Em.

I got a chord diagram book, I learned maybe 10 chords, but it's there for reference. All it is is diagrams of the chords as you would fret them.

How I fingerpick is:
thumb ring middle index thumb ring middle index, with the right hand, chording w standard chords on left hand. Whether you use your thumb on the E or A or D string depends on each chord, but generally the top 3 strings are played ring-middle-index fingers. I kind of combined what I read on this little book, the internet, and mcgyver music skills to get this and it seems to work.

What kind of picks do you have, if any? I started out with green Tortex 0.88mm but they were too thick, I use the orange 0.73 I think, it could be 0.60mm, the yellow is the other number. I like the colorful picks, also how they feel a bit matte and dusty when I get them, and they wear smooth with use. If it was shiny & tortoiseshell, I would feel as if I had to play some Beatles. :P If they are any thinner than 0.60 I get a little mental.

I am practising with a metronome, I have a $25 electronic Korg one, so I don't sound like shit all the time. (:O) I mean I could learn so many bad habits it's not funny, esp. w no teacher.

If you can rent a DVD of a musician you like, a live one, and puzzle out what the chords are from seeing them play; that's the final word that they use at mystupidmouth.com if they are unsure of how to tab something out. I watched John Mayer play Why Georgia on Any Given Thursday DVD, he was farting around in his hotel room as one of the extras, and when I saw how easy it was to fingerpick Why Georgia, well when I saw his hands, it was crystal clear, and now I play it! :) Or go to open mic nights and observe. Every time I go, there's someone with some funky tuning or who uses slide guitar or who is lefthanded or something. A veritable cross-section of examples of guitar usage.

[bloobert]

The pick I've been using is .88, but maybe I need a lighter one. Your talk of 'keys' is confounding to me =) I know nothing. I'm not even sure what to call the strings. I know the 1st and 6th string are E, but that's about it.

Yes please... if it's not too much trouble, I wouldn't mind tab of Sunrise and Impatiens (my faves)...

[kamomil]

Well, a key is a bunch of notes that make up a particular scale. The "doh" note of a scale, ie the one it starts and ends on, the key is named after that "doh" note. So if a song is in D, chances are it will start and end on a D chord too, and there is a little posse of chords that follow D along everywhere in pop music, ie G, A, and Bm, and maybe Em.

If you are in my choir at church, many people find the notes are too high because they are really altos trying to sing soprano notes. So frequently I have to lower the key, ie D one note lower is C. So the little posse of chords all follow suit, ie the chords in C are C, F, G, Am and sometimes Dm. All the chords moved backward in the alphabet by 1 letter, ie they moved down in pitch. That's called transposing.

For me, all the little guys in the chord posse all have names, not Biff and Sully etc., ha ha, but I know them individually enough to know what their purpose is during each time the posse goes out to do some project.
In D, the D is Tonic, the leader
the G is Subdominant, 3rd in importance
the A is Dominant, 2nd in command
the Bm is technically Submediant but he frequently gets called Relative Minor, the shit disturber
the Em is Supertonic, shit disturber's brother

No matter what key a song is in, all those dudes carry out the same roles. The note names may change, but the Dominant is always the same distance from the Tonic. That way it is easier for me to transpose and change keys, cause I don't get held up thinking of note names, just distances between notes.

The more songs you learn, the more these dudes' roles will become reinforced. That is, in pop music.

I will tab those out later when I get a sec.

Here's BNL's its all been done, real quick.

verse
D G Em A
D G Em A

D D D D

whoo hoo hoo, it's all been done
G Bm G D
G Em Em A A

[bloobert]

Thanks for the mini-lesson =) It all seems rather complicated, though I can't pretend I didn't know there was actual theory to music. I guess I was hoping to avoid having to learn any =)

I think I should learn how to play scales. I'd never been interested in that kind of practice before, but I think it would be pretty useful.

[kamomil]

Don't bother learning scales, unless you want to be a blues soloing person.

Just learn D, E, Em, maybe F chords, (ie Fm, F#m) for sure G and A, Am, B, Bm, C, and get a good capo so that you can Mcgyver all the rest of the chords.

Leave lots of time for B, Bm and the F chords, because they are "barred" ie you will have to press your pointer finger down and fret all the strings at once. But your fingers are probably manlier than mine, so maybe it won't be a big problem. However it does take a little coordination practice to flop your whole finger down accurately over all 6 strings and get them right without any buzzing. Just be patient, your fingers will eventually remember what they are supposed to be doing.

Here's all the theory you will need:
If a song is in D, the chords on 1, 4, 5, and 6, and sometimes 2, are important. ie in D, they are D, G, A, Bm, and Em. Happily most of them are the easier ones listed above. :P I am telling you that, so that if you sit down and try to figure out the chords on your own for a song, try those and it will likely be one of them, unless it is some avant-garde 12 tone row weird stuff. That's all I do.

Oh and you will see symbols like
X00232

That is a D chord. The digits stand for the strings, starting with the low E and working across. The numbers refer to the fret that you are fretting on that string. An X means mute that string with a finger.
Another way of writing it is
2--0
3--0
2--0
0--2
0--2
X--0
That is a D chord, then an Em. The bottom row is the low E string, and left-to-right is moving forward in time. These notations allow you to express non-standard exact chord forms.