Part Three: Guitar dreams and struggles

Guitar is now firmly in my sub conscious as I am having guitar dreams. Last night I dreamt that Graham Coxon was giving me a guitar lesson. I told him that I struggled to change from the C chord to the G chord and he said it was to do with my elbow position. He then got me to play the chords and said it was due to the action of my guitar and asked me if it had been dropped or damaged. Just as I was about to find out more information that probably wasn’t true, the dream changed. I remember trying to force it to come back but that never works with dreams. A similar thing happened a few nights ago when I was playing the guitar in a large room with my guitar teacher and lots of other people that I presumed to be friends of his. I was enjoying this but then my alarm clock went off.

Monday’s guitar lesson was cancelled by Max. He suggested Tuesday but that was Brit awards night, so I said Wednesday. I always watch the Brit awards, even when they’re shit. The worst one was the year Cat Dealey hosted and was introduced on stage riding a bottle of champagne. The Darkness cleaned up that year, even winning a specially invented Rock award, which was soon dropped by the Brits when they realised what I had known since day one about that band – that they were a complete novelty and were destined for long-term failure. 1995 was my first Brits and my musical epiphany, the year Blur cleaned up for Parklife. That night not only changed the lives of the members of Blur, it changed my life and the lives of millions of others too. 17 years later (where do the years go?) they would be collecting an outstanding contribution to music award and I wasn’t going to miss that.

 IMAGE: Cat Deeley rides a giant bottle of champagne at the 2004 Brit awards

Unfortunately, the celebration of their success was spoilt by ITV’s Brit awards producers. Adele’s acceptance speech for best album was cut before she even got to say thank you to anyone, so Blur walked onto a chorus of boos. You could see the shock and determination in the band member’s faces as they were surprised by the reaction but were determined to turn it around. Unfortunately the pissed music industry execs and celebs didn’t sing along, much to Damon’s surprise and frustration. He really gave it everything though, and you could see how much effort he had put in at the end of their 5-song 11-minute set of Girls & Boys, Song 2, Parklife, Tender and This is a Low. The highlight was Tender but this would have been missed by the vast majority of the ITV1 audience, as ITV cut Blur towards the end of Parklife and didn’t announce that they were continuing on ITV2 until the end of a 5-minute ad break. It wouldn’t have happened on the BBC.

The other highlight was some good close-ups of Graham playing his black Fender Telecaster Deluxe guitar. I look closely at guitarists now and try and see what they’re doing and work out what chords and notes they’re playing. I do this with the Covent Garden buskers I walk past every day and guitarists I see on TV. Other than some tricky note playing, Graham was playing quite a lot of barre chords.

I went to Max’s that Wednesday and played one of the simple folk songs I’d learnt that week – Down in the Valley. Frustratingly I didn’t play it as well as I had during the week, but he seemed reasonably pleased with my progress.  I then played him the two-note power chords, which again seemed adequate. I was then shown 3-note power chords, barre chords, some 12-bar blues riffs and  the music  to You Really Got Me by the Kinks. All seemed impossibly hard, but knowing that I had managed to work through the previous week’s work quite well, I hoped that I would continue to make improvements.

This week’s homework has been my hardest and most frustrating yet. In previous weeks I couldn’t play the pieces at first but then got the hang of them as the week went on. This week, however, I have really struggled. It has felt like when I first tried to learn how to play the guitar: My fingers hurt, they won’t stretch far enough, and I can’t get the chords and notes to sound nice. I felt quite depressed as I hit this brick wall. But that’s the thing about learning the guitar, or any other musical instrument, or new skill – some bits you find fairly easy and pick up quickly and other bits you find really hard and take ages to master. 

 I had enjoyed playing the simple folk songs as I picked them up easy, but found the 3-note power chords, blues riffs and You Really Got Me, with its power and barre chords, really hard. But as I wanted to be able to do more than play simple folk songs I had to do something about this. To overcome this frustration, I simplified things. Instead of playing 3 notes at a time I played one or 2 and used my little finger as much as possible in order to strengthen it and harden the skin on it. The little finger on my left hand is hardly ever used, not even for typing, so unsurprisingly I was finding it hard to stretch it to reach the notes I needed to play a few frets down from where my first and second fingers were.

 It also hurt when I pressed down on the strings with my little finger, so I played as many four-finger chords as possible. In the process I learn the C7, G7 and E7 chords, which I enjoy playing as they make a really nice sound and are quite easy to change to and from each other. I wrote a simple riff based on strumming and then picking the notes of these chords. I enjoyed this – the first thing I had ever written on the guitar, and instantly felt a lot better about my progress.

Another development this week was when I worked out the layout of the notes on a guitar. Again, this is something fairly obvious to someone with basic musical training, but something that had confused me and I was pleased that I had worked it out for myself. Play the top E-string open and you will have the note of E; put your finger down on the first fret and you have the note of F (as there is no E sharp/ F flat); put your finger down on the second fret and you have the note of atF sharp/G flat; and so on as you go up the scale of notes – C, D, E, F, G, A and B. The second string of the guitar played open gives you B; put your finger on the first fret and you have C (as there is no B sharp/C flat); put your finger on the second fret and you have C sharp/D flat; and so on up the scale as per before. Each string of the guitar is the notes of a piano, just starting in a different position.

On reflection, despite my frustrations at not being able to complete my homework for the first time, I had learnt quite a lot that week. Certainly family members could notice an improvement. Once again I am pleased with my progress but overwhelmed by the amount there is to learn. I remind myself that I have only be properly learning the guitar for 3 weeks and that what makes the guitar such a fascinating and beautiful instrument is that you never stop learning…

Lessons learnt: 12-bar blues pattern; F chord and barre chords; 3-note E5/E6, A5/A6 and D5/D6 power chords; C7, G7 and E7 chords, the layout of the notes on a guitar; my first self-composed guitar riff.