Strumming, singing, changing chords, and keeping rhythm all at once is the one of the most difficult tasks I have ever tried to accomplish. My goal was to post a video of myself performing Jolene this weekend, but after nearly a week and a half of practice, Isabelle suggested that I try something a little easier. For the past two days I have been working on a new song. I am not sure what it is called, but I feel much more confident in playing it already. The song is slower with an easier rhythm for me to follow. Since I failed to post a video of Jolene this week, I will be posting this new song on Wednesday or Thursday. I am going to continue working on Jolene for the next few weeks, and I hope to be able to play it before Genius Hour is over.
I know that I would like to have been able to play better than I can by now, but the learning process is slow. Along with school and sports, learning something completely new is challenging. Trying to fit that twenty minutes a day into my everyday schedule sometimes means that I have to stay up a little later, or wake up earlier. Some nights I have to sneak into my sister's room to get the guitar and practice very quietly in my own room. I'm proud of my progress, even though it's not great.
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This week I have been trying to learn a new song that uses a chord that I don't normally play. The song is still fairly simple, but I would like to practice a few more days before I post another video. I feel like I have made a lot of progress in the past three weeks or so. I sound less like Phoebe from friends every couple of days. The song that I have been practicing is Dolly Parton's Jolene. It is very difficult because the song is extremely fast paced compared to songs that I have worked on before. Lost boy was much slower, along with Wildwood Flower, Blackberry Bush, and the other songs that Isabelle has taught me. I feel like I need to try and play the song a little slower, just because I get confused if I go too fast strumming.
Practicing a little every day has really helped me in the past few weeks. Practicing for 20 minutes a day rather than an hour every three days really makes a difference in playing. Instead of focusing on learning new things, I have tried to work with what I already know and am confident with. Rather than trying to learn new chords all the time, I have six or seven that I try to work on making better. I hope to improve my performance over the next week, and to get the strumming pattern correct. Another difficult thing about learning different songs is trying to get the strumming pattern right for each song. I struggle a lot :) Over the next few weeks, I am going to try to figure out what song I would like to play for my final performance of the semester. If anyone has suggestions please leave them in the comments! This week, I focused on learning how to play the song Lost Boy by Ruth B. This was the song that my sister played at the South Davie talent show recently. I had my wisdom teeth removed last Friday, so I didn't feel up to practicing until Tuesday. I started practicing on Wednesday and didn't do that great. Its supposed to be an easy song, but I had only heard it once before. When learning this song, I had to practice the lyrics, the rhythm, the strumming pattern, and chords transitions all together. I had never played a song and sang at the same time until Saturday. I learned the basic songs the first few weeks of playing, but this one challenged me because of everything added together. A song that I already knew would be easier, but every song I really liked was difficult to play (how ironic). I practiced this song in front of my family today when we went to Sunday dinner at Mamaw's house, and I did pretty well. I feel like I've been learning a lot more than I can actually do. Isabelle has been teaching me about bar chords and writing songs, but I don't think that I'm quite there yet. The difference in learning from her and an actual guitar teacher means that she is flying past me in her music and trying to teach me what she knows, but I am not ready for it. The important part is that I am learning and I am beginning to make progress. My fingers don't hurt anymore and I am capable of playing a song. I made a video of me playing the first verse and chorus of Lost Boy. I am not a great singer, but the song sounds weird if I don't sing, so enjoy the YouTube video below!
This week I was able to go watch my sister perform at the South Davie Talent Show. She did a fantastic job for only playing the guitar for two months. Being able to watch her play in front of a crowd was inspiring to me. I try my hardest to never cry in public, but she made me do it. Seeing her play in front of an audience for the first time just made me realize that I have not been doing as good as she has over the past few weeks to learn how to do something new. She has more talent than I do, without a doubt, but my self doubt has been holding me back from becoming a better player. So, in an attempt to put doubt out of my mind, I will be posting a video over spring break of me playing a song on guitar. I would like to wait until my cheeks aren't swollen anymore from the removal of my wisdom teeth, but if all else fails, I will post one without my face in it ;)
I have been working on my new chords, as well as the old ones. I think I do much better when I slow down and just play at my own pace, then build up to a decent rhythm. Watching a lot of youtube videos helps a lot. I think I will wait to go into detail in my next blog post with the addition of a video. I hope everyone is excited! Happy Easter! This week has been a blur. I practiced every day except for Tuesday night. Everything seems to be going by so fast because there is so much going on. I think I am improving some. This week I improved my transitions a lot, but I also learned a couple of new chords. I learned A minor and E. This was actually great because it added to my knowledge of guitar, but now its a little harder to remember the new ones.
This week I focused mainly on transitioning from chord to chord. I have realized that i absolutely hate this. Every time I play, I do something wrong. I don't understand what it is I am doing or why I cant play as well as I should be by now. Every day when I practice with my sister, she plays more and more beautifully and I continue to sound awful. I always have my chords wrong or can't get a good rhythm. Nothing seems to be helping no matter how often I watch videos or get help from Isabelle. My dad actually came into my room on thursday and request that I did not play anymore for the night because i sounded bad. He is being supportive of my learning process, but it is just that bad. I can play wildwood flower okayish now. I still can not play the full song without messing up. I have created numerous videos with no luck in playing it correctly. I end up deleting them because the mistakes are obvious. The only thing I am proud of is that I am becoming somewhat comfortable with transitioning chords. It is still not good enough to play in front of an audience, but hopefully I’ll get there. Today, I took the guitar to my grandparents house in hopes of getting help from my mother’s musically inclined family, but no one was really helpful. They said that i could eventually get to a decent place with the music. This may have been a not so great project idea since I have no musical background and struggle a lot with playing. I am hoping to be able to play any song, even if it is a really simple one. If I can not reach my goal by the end of the semester, at least I have tried and basically learned something.
This week I tried to focus on transitions. I can move pretty well from G chord to E minor to C chord. I think playing more has made me more comfortable with switching chords. It is easy for me to switch between G and E minor because they are kind of closer together.
Isabelle has helped me a lot this week with learning to play tabs as well. We figured out that I am having a hard time because the actual strings are the opposite of how they are on the tabs sheet. Instead of learning how to do something that doesn't make sense, we re wrote the songs in a form that makes more sense to me. Writing the songs in a different form really helped me to play better. I can play most of Wildwood Flower now without getting confused. I plan to practice more this week and hopefully inculde a video in my next post. Playing guitar is much harder than I expected it to be. I was hoping to include a video before now, but playing songs is even harder than playing single chords. The hardest part about plying Wildwood Flower is that some of the measures are so similar that I get confused and play the wrong thing. I want to be able to play correctly, as well as in good rhythm. When I try to play faster, I get confused and my fingers go on the wrong strings. Practice makes perfect though! Hopefully this week I will be able to practice more and re write more songs in my new form of tabs :) This week I continued practicing the things I have already learned. I focused mainly on strumming and transitioning between chords. I am trying not to look at both hands while playing, but have a hard time not looking at my left hand. Trying to transition between chords is difficult when not looking. If I had more time to practice my skills would most likely improve.
This week, I learned how to play a few chords. I also worked on learning how to strum. When learning how to strum, I had a hard time with relaxing my wrist and keeping my hand under control at the same time. I was only hitting the bottom four strings for the first few strums and did not even realize it. After a little while, I was able to strum fairly consistently.
The hardest part of this week's learning was figuring out how to play the chords. I had a hard time stretching my fingers and pressing down hard on the strings. Holding the strings down for longer than 30 seconds made my fingertips sore. My sister said that eventually it wouldn't hurt quite as bad, but to take things slow when beginning to play chords. I learned how to play the chords G, C, D, and E minor. I tried to transition between the chords when strumming, but had difficulty remembering the finger placement that quickly. I will have to work on transitions between chords in the following week. This week I was also able to play Wildflower a little quicker than I was able to when I first started. I became more familiar with learning how to read tabs and where I should be placing my fingers and picking the strings. I was not able to play it perfectly, but was happy with my progress. I watched a couple more tutorials on how to read tabs. They were more helpful in allowing me to read the music quicker and recognizing patterns. The only thing that I truly struggle with is remembering where the chords are and trying not to look at my hands. Sometimes I think playing guitar would be easier if I could look in three directions at the same time. Then maybe I could read the music and watch both hands at the same time. Before I begin to play the guitar, I need to learn how to read music. My sister is learning how to play guitar in a different way then what I saw in YouTube videos. She has sheet music that looks like the frets on a guitar, rather than sheet music like I would expect. I watched the video placed below in order to learn how to read sheet music using the treble staff notes. From the video, I learned that the spaces between the lines are labeled FACE and the lines are notes EGBDF. The attached sheet music is how I will be learning to play guitar and read music. The notes are placed on the lines. The lines represent the strings and the numbers represent the frets. To play the measure separated by the slashes, you hold your finger on the string and the fret number, then pick the string. I tried to begin the first measure of Wildwood Flower and realized that this project may be much harder than I thought. When I began to play, my fingers did not want to conform to the positions they needed to be in. Isabelle said this is the hardest part about learning to play. I also had trouble picking the chords because I can't see both of my hands at the same time. I am going to have to learn by muscle memory which chords belong where. I've had a pretty rough start so far, although my goal is to increase success with time. The biggest problem that I had today was that I dropped the guitar when standing up to put it back in the case. It now has a chip and I have to pay to get it fixed or buy another for my sister. This was a very unexpected expense that I will need to solve as soon as possible.
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Sarah BrackenI am a student learning to play guitar in order to expand my creativity and artistic side. I will be documenting my progress throughout the spring semester. |
Photo used under Creative Commons from wuestenigel