Part Eleven: Riffs and ruts

In sport, you’re only as good as your last game. I’m only as good as my last guitar lesson and unfortunately I wasn’t great this week. Admittedly I was very tired and found it hard to concentrate, but also even though I had practised every day for the last week, I hadn’t spent a great deal of time (just 5-10 minutes some days) practising, and I think it showed. I managed to mess up a Rock School piece that I played quite well last week and I left the lesson frustrated – a common feeling for someone learning to play the guitar. 

The strange thing is that some days I can play something quite well and other days I can’t. Again, this is likely to be a common situation for anyone learning a musical instrument.  There are a lot of factors – tiredness, distractions, practise time, feelings – I suppose like anything it is all about getting yourself in the right frame of mind to start with.

So that week I ensured that I practised at every available opportunity. That week’s homework was blues riffs based around the E5, A5 and D5 2-note power chords. I picked this up fairly quickly and enjoyed being able to play these recognisable riffs.

Other than that I continued to practise my 10 or so traditional songs – I can play Camptown Races without having to look at the tab now – and continued my chord changes and strumming practise. I find the practise of alternating my strumming with 3 or 4 different chords very relaxing and enjoyable.

Top Tens: My top ten tips for a beginner guitarist

1.    Buy an electric guitar. They are easier to play than an acoustic as generally have thinner strings and a lower action (this means you don’t have to press down on the strings as hard). You can get a decent beginners kit with amp, lead, spare strings, bag and a tuner for under £130.

2.    Use YouTube and JustinGuitar.com to learn the basics – how to hold the guitar, how to hold the plectrum, how to play your first chords – D, A and E. Your fingers will hurt a lot at first but keep playing and you’ll develop harder skin and it won’t hurt any more. You’ll soon get bored of strumming the same chords, so learn some more – G, C, A minor and E minor. Keep practising strumming and chord changes. Add some up strokes in between the beats.

3.    Learn guitar tab. Go on UltimateGuitar.com and look up a simple song you know. Tab is very easy – 0 means play the string open, x or nothing means don’t play the string, 1 means play the string on the first fret, 2 means play it on the second fret, etc.

4.    Learn a tune – it’s a great feeling being able to play a tune that someone can recognise. Use JustinGuitar.com to learn a beginner’s song with the chords you’ve learnt, or go on UltimateGuitar.com and look up traditional and children’s songs. Three Blind Mice was the first tune I learnt.

5.    Make a note of your progress – like this blog or an old fashioned piece of paper. By doing this I can keep track of my development and it has helped learning the guitar to become a large part of my life.

6.    Your guitar is a musical instrument, not a toy – keep it in tune and clean. It will sound much better if you do. Have fun but don’t mess around by strumming aimlessly – you want to learn!

7.    Think about music when you’re not playing the guitar. The pressures of modern life mean that you probably won’t have as much time to practise as you’d like, so spend as much time as you can listening to and thinking about music. Try and work out the chords or notes in your favourite song, for example.

8.    Get a teacher. I think it’s probably a waste of money to get a teacher when you first pick up the guitar, as a lot of the basics can be learnt online for free. But once you can play a few chords then it is definitely worthwhile. Having weekly lessons gives me the motivation to keep practising every day so that I improve every week.

9.    Practise every day. It is very important that you practise every day. 10 minutes a day, every day, is much better for leaning than 2 hours once a week. The ideal setup for practising is sitting on a straight back armless chair in a room on your own.  If you are reading from a book or sheet music while you’re playing then buy a music stand. They are cheap and it’s much easier to practise than balancing the book on your lap. Learning the guitar is a solitary exercise, so shut yourself away. Basically you want to remove or at least minimise all distractions.

10.    Keep  practising! Learning the guitar is painful, frustrating, time-consuming and solitary. It is also very relaxing, enjoyable, fun and rewarding. The only way to get better at the guitar is to keep practising. It is often very frustrating as a beginner and it is very easy to give up. I gave up many times in the last 18 years.

Part Ten: Getting better

Other than 2 days where I have been out all day and evening, I have played the guitar every day for the last ten weeks, on average about 30 minutes a day. That makes about 35 hours of playing the guitar. This is the most I have ever played a musical instrument. I have spent hundreds of pounds in lessons and equipment and it has taken up all my spare home time but it has definitely been worth it.

I now really enjoy playing the guitar: yesterday I sat down and strummed my D minor, A minor, E minor, A minor chord sequence for about 10 minutes, varying the strumming, and I thought nothing else other than how good this sounded to me. When I finished I put my guitar down and thought to myself ‘I fucking love playing the guitar’.  This is success for me – I may never  release a song that I have written, and I may never be remembered for my music – but I have found something that gives me a great deal of satisfaction.  It’s been a struggle but after keeping at it for ten weeks I can now honestly say that I can play a musical instrument. A bit.

In this week’s lesson I showed Max my improvements in chord changes and how I now look at my finger positions and think about the quickest way to move to the next chord. He seemed pleased with my progress. We then played the previous week’s Rock School Grade One piece – Gone but not forgotten.  I say we as I was playing the tab and he was accompanying me with some extra chords and licks. I managed to get through the song in one go reasonably OK which was a good feeling. Playing music with someone else is a great feeling; the connection you have with the other musician or musicians is the closest you can get to telepathy. This was the first time I have played anything of any significance with anyone else since my band disbanded at the age of 20. It may have been a simple Grade Once piece with my guitar tutor but it sounded pretty good to me!

VIDEO: Gone But Not Forgotten. I play at half this speed.

Now I could play these pieces, I moved on to trying to play them better. For me this meant working on the timing until it is spot on with how the piece is written. Max took me through the piece again, line by line as I worked on my timing. I was given another Rock School Grade One piece to add to my collection, and left feeling please with my progress.

That week’s practise continued along my similar pattern of playing Rock School Grade One pieces, the rhythm guitar part from Can’t Buy Me Love by The Beatles, my growing collection of traditional songs, and practising major, minor, sus 4 and seventh chord changes. The good thing about practising pretty much the same things every week is that you can see the improvement. I am definitely getting better with continued practise - it’s the only way to get better after all.

Lessons learnt: E minor 7 chord, better timing, better chord changes.

Part Nine: Slowing down and playing chords

I explained to Max my problems with the fourth fret notes and he told me I was over complicating things. I was right to use the third finger for the fourth fret notes if I used my fist finger for the second fret notes. This meant that the one finger per fret rule was not broken.  My problem with changing notes would be solved by me moving my next finger to the note after the next one before I played it. This meant that I was now thinking 2 notes ahead rather than one note ahead as I had been. I found this hard at first but I’m sure like everything else it will be a lot easier after practising it many times.

I was given another Rock School Grade One piece which I played OK but a little too fast and rushed through a couple of sections. Max reminded me to slow it down until I could play it correctly. It’s a golden rule when learning the guitar, when learning  any musical instrument  I’d imagine, and a previous lesson learnt, but it’s so important that it needs repeating: play slowly because if you can’t play a piece/chords/notes slowly then you will never be able to play them quickly.

I was also given the scale of G major to practise, as this is a good exercise that involves all 4 fingers and all 6 strings of the guitar. Other than that I told Max that although I felt my picking and note playing at improved fairly quickly, I was still struggling with chord changes. He told me to look at different ways of changing chords and suggested using different finger positions, for which he showed me G to C chord change as an example.

So I decided that in this week’s practise I wouldn’t spend as much time as usual on picking, and instead focus on chords. I strummed the A chord and then looked to change to the C chord. Previously I would have taken all 3 finger s off and then put them down again. This time I noticed one of my fingers was already on the correct string and fret (E note, fourth string, second fret) so I kept that finger pressed down as I moved my other two fingers. Voila – instantly quicker chord changes from A to C and C to A.

IMAGE: The A and C chords. Ignore the numbers. On both chords the note of E (fourth string, second fret) is already in place, so when changing from C to A or A to C, keep this finger pressed down while you move your other 2 fingers.

I strummed away on C and A for a bit and then added the G, D and E chords. This sequence – A, C, A, C, G, D, E, G, D, E sounded good, so I kept repeating it and varied my strumming. Pleased with my improvements in playing these chords I tried adding some sus 4 chords, as a major chord to a sus 4 chord is an easy change – you generally just add your fourth finger to a fret higher than one of the exsting notes. With this I came up with a riff – A, A sus4, A, A sus4 A, D, D sus4, D, D sus4, D, E, E sus4, E, E sus4, E. It sounds quite rocky. Pleased with the major and sus4  versions of the key 3 chords for beginners, I then had a go at strumming the minor chords. Starting with D minor, I then went to A minor and finally E minor before repeating again. For both the minor piece and the sus4 piece I varied my strumming.

I played all of these chord practices on both my electric and acoustic guitars – with growing confidence and ability I was now more comfortable playing chords on my acoustic. It’s perfect for practising as there is less room for error with an electric. Once you can play something quite well on an acoustic, then it is easy to play on an electric.

My guitar music discovery continued this week and for the first time it didn’t involve music from the 1990’s. I watched the 2 hour Queen documentary – Days of Our Lives – and was compelled to buy their Platinum Collection – Queen’s Greatest Hits I (the biggest selling album in the UK of all time), Greatest Hits II (my favourite of theirs) and III which has a mixture of live tracks, remixes, solo tracks, and post-Freddie releases. Upon watching David Bowie perform Queen Bitch on a Top of the Pops 1970s and hearing that instantly memorable guitar riff, I also downloaded his famous Hunky Dory album. I looked up the tab and had a go but soon gave up and returned to my practise of traditional songs, Rock School Grade One pieces, and major and minor chord changes.

I also had another guitar dream – I dreamt that I was onstage with Radiohead and I was playing the A and C chords on a black Les Paul Gibson, for which I had no guitar strap so had to hold the guitar and try and play it at the same time. What do you make of that then Freud?

Lessons learnt: E Sus4 chord, A7 chord, play slowly and correctly, look at different ways of changing chords.

Part Eight: Rock School grade one

Pleased with that week’s progress, I went to the next lesson with Max keen to show him what I had learnt. I played Gotta Lotta Rosa quite well but not as well as I had been playing; Max still seemed pleased with my progress though. He then gave me 6 more Rock School grade one pieces plus a backing track cd. I could now play along with the band! 

Whilst I don’t want to do the Rock School course (I’m not learning the guitar to get qualifications), the grade one pieces have definitely helped with my learning so far. I’d recommend the course to a young beginner or someone who would like some music qualifications. For me, I am happy with my bespoke pick and mix teaching, accompanied with my growing repertoire of folk songs. 

I had a few goes at playing along with the backing tracks but was unable to keep in time. The cd was useful though as it’s obviously easier to play a tune when you’ve heard how you should be playing it first. Previously I had just been reading the sheet music and tab, now I had the music I listened to it whilst reading the sheet music and tab. It was a good job I did this as I missed a few repeats in my reading. For musical novices like me, a repeat symbol is a colon like sign at the end of a bar, you go back to where you see a colon at the start of the bar and play that bit again.

IMAGE: Repeat symbol in musical notation

Overall I managed these tunes OK, the only problems being the parts that involved playing fourth fret notes. At first I used my third finger for these but then found that I was getting my fingers tied up when I went to move to the next notes, so I tried my fourth (little) finger a few times but found that it didn’t have much strength. Remembering a part of a previous Rock School Grade One piece that I had struggled with but could now play quite well, I accepted that it was just a case of practise. These tunes, whilst not very exciting, are good practise as involve a mixture of chords, alternative strumming, picking and syncopation.

My rediscovery of guitar music continued with the purchase of The Bends by Radiohead. I have always felt reluctant to buy a Radiohead album as there is something about the band that doesn’t quite sit right with me. Maybe it’s because they’re from Oxford or maybe it’s because they’re a bit pretentious. Despite this I was glad with my purchase of The Bends as it’s a great album full of really good guitar songs. It’s Radiohead writing tunes and for that reason many rate it as their best album. I must have a go at the opening chords to Just.

Lessons learnt: Better understanding of musical notation, keep practising.