I stopped writing this blog for a few weeks – hence the
briefness of the last entry and the need for this multi-week entry. I have a natural creative drive – hence my
passion for music, reading, writing and now playing the guitar. When the
passion is strongest I can come up with a lot of ideas – songs, blogs,
articles, theories and guitar riffs. When it is weakest I find it hard to come
up with anything – I don’t read, I don’t write, I don’t listen to music and I
don’t spend much time playing the guitar.
During the week I practise the guitar towards the end of a
long day – generally about 14 hours after I have got up. As such I am usually
incredibly tired and find it hard to concentrate. Thankfully my determination
to learn the guitar has meant that for all but a handful of evenings, I have
practised the guitar every day for the last 3 months. This week contained one
of those handful of days – I just got home, sat on the sofa, ate my dinner,
watched TV, had a shower and then went to bed. I didn’t even think about playing
the guitar.
The next day’s guitar lesson was performance-wise one of my
worst ever. I was tired, out of practise, stressed out and in the process of developing
a cold. My confidence was next to zero but thankfully Max recognised this and
was encouraging. This week’s practise was Smoke on the Water – one of the most
famous guitar riffs ever and one that millions of people have played on the
guitar. Whilst it is instantly recognisable and easy to play, it’s not really
the sort of thing I want to be playing. I don’t want to learn the guitar to
play famous rock riffs – I want to learn the guitar so that I can write my own
songs. I understood why Max gave me the track though; it is mainly 2-note power
chords, then some 3 note power chords, a simple picking riff and then finally the
return to the famous riff. The reason why I was given the piece was because
although I could play all the parts on their own, I now need to be able play a
whole song from start to finish.
I left the lesson with instructions from Max to practise a
couple of the Rock School pieces I liked against the backing tracks he had
given me. The aim of this is to improve my timing – something I particularly
struggle with – and to therefore improve my playing so that I can play a whole
song from start to finish, not just parts of it. I tend to fumble through the
more difficult parts of songs, so that I can soon get back to the bit I can
play well. Like it or not, if I want to get any better I need to practise the
parts I can’t play well, and also practise moving from the easier parts to the
harder parts and back again.
Two weeks ago it was my birthday – hence the title of this
blog piece. For a while now I have been a man who it is hard to by presents for
– I don’t want anything and anything I want I have got already. Now I have a
pretty serious hobby, it’s no surprise that the vast majority of my birthday
presents were guitar related. Of these I got a guitar stool/stand (I have
needed another stand since I bought my acoustic guitar), the Justin Sandecoe
beginners songbook (which I asked for – it has simplified chord only versions
of popular guitar songs), and a pack of chord cards (my favourite present). The
chord cards are great and I highly recommend them to anyone learning the
guitar. The 52 chords show a different chord, the fingering positions, and very
helpfully what chords they go with. I
have spent a lot of my practise time over the last week and a bit practising
different chord sequences and alternating my strumming – my favourite one
currently is A minor, C, A minor, C, D minor, G, E minor, A minor. I also enjoy
strumming along to A, D, G, E.
The other thing Max showed me this week was a slightly
simpler but more complete version of Smells Like Teen Spirit. I had struggled
with the first version a few weeks back and gave it up due to frustration. The
hardest thing for me is the timing of the famous riff – I really struggle with
that and so Max spent quite of this week’s lesson getting me to play over again
until I played it in time.
Something I have learnt from learning the guitar is that I
am not a naturally gifted musician. I love music and have a creative brain but
music does not come naturally to me. This is why my three previous attempts to
learn the guitar and my one attempt to learn the keyboard have failed pretty
quickly. Now I am older and having faced what I call my quarter-life crisis, I
have the determination to finally do something that I have always wanted to -
to learn the guitar. But it’s hard work.
Thankfully despite the many negatives there are many
positives. I am getting better –particularly at playing chords – and this has
been recognised by my girlfriend. The improvement is very gradual and
impossible to notice on a day to day basis but I’m heading in the right
direction. It’s hard to recognise that sometimes, especially when confidence is
low and tiredness is high. But thankfully I do – I’m not going to give up on my
ambitions just yet.
