Here we are on day 7. I’ve been practicing quite a bit, probably about 30 minutes a day.

My finger tips are definitely getting tougher but are still just a little bit tender. At least pain is no longer the primary reason to stop a practice session.

Chords are frustrating! I’m having a really tough time with the the G7 chord and my “A” finger touching the vibrating “D” string and causing a buzz. No matter how I hold my fingers, they just get into the space of the other strings. I don’t have very big fingertips, so I’m hoping it’s just a matter of practice, and maybe as they toughen up, they won’t take up so much space when I press down hard.

I’ve taken a close look at what’s going on, and all I have to do is barely touch the D string while it is sounding and a buzz gets introduced. I have found that if I strum more softly, the strings don’t vibrate as widely and it is less likely to touch my finger that’s on a neighboring string. So for now, I’ll just strum softly.

It’s questions like this that can make self-learning frustrating. Anyone got any advice?

I’m not exactly proficient in all the week one skills, but I’m ready to move on to the next session. It doesn’t look like there’s much new hand-skills anyway, more knowledge. Session 2 is more single-note finger skills as well as learning how to read sheet music.

I’ve been watching the Grammy Awards this week piece by piece on DVR as my daughter has been catching up with it.

Now that I’ve got guitar on the brain, I notice things that I wouldn’t have otherwise noticed.
Instead of being hypnotized by her pretty face like the rest of the world, I was watching Taylor’s hands on her guitar.

Now maybe she’s just making it look easy, but my God, if this little girl can do this, so can I. (Now maybe she can play a mean lead guitar as well, I’m just not enough of a Taylor Swift fan to know.)

That really is easy stuff, right? Just getting good at some chords and changes.

No big deal. Right?

Just a quick status update. I’ve been keeping up pretty well with the daily routine. My fingers are getting tougher, and I find it just a little easier each time to get some solid notes out of the guitar. It’s pretty fun to see that I can find and switch between the two chords just a little bit easier.

I did make a few purchases today on Amazon:

• A guitar stand – I don’t have a case, and the guitar is always either leaning up against the wall or laying on the love seat in my office. The kids are always grabbing at it, so I thought I’d get a stable stand to put it on. I definitely want to keep the guitar out as I find that it “calls” to me during to day to pick it up and practice a bit.
• A strap- A basic black guitar strap. Not that I really need it, but I thought I’d get one.
• A tuner – I’ve been using a tuner app on my iPhone, and it appears to be working, but I’m not entirely sure that I trust it. So I spent $10 on this one over to the right, by Korg.

Something cool happened today

It is still very difficult for me to picture myself actually playing the guitar, though something fun did happen this morning. My 18 month old son Jason was particularly cranky this morning. So I dropped him in my office chair and I played for him. Granted, I just strummed the C chord and sang “Yankee Doodle”.

I was playing. sorta.

I’m sure it sounded horrible, but he smiled, clapped, and when I was done he asked for “more” with sign language, which we’ve been teaching him. Pretty cool feeling.

The sign for “more” is very similar to “ouch”.

Part of the SLG blog will be to do some videos. Maybe one a week to illustrate what the training sessions are about and more importantly to sort of keep a journal of my progress.

I suck so bad that I won’t play very much for you this time around. I hope that’ll start to change soon…

Notes:

• Legacy Learning System, Learn and Master Guitar
• My guitar
• Deciding whether to play right-hand or left hand
• Session one lessons – the basics.
• Finger work up and down the strings
• C Chord, G7 Chord
• Toughening up the fingers

This is my second day playing and working on Session 1 of Learn & Master Guitar.

This lesson focuses on getting off to the right start. It talks about how to read guitar tablature, the proper way to finger the frets, hold a pick and strum the guitar.

My first issue is that I’m a lefty, playing on a right-handed guitar. I don’t think that things would necessarily be any easier on a left-handed guitar, but I do know that I play air guitar left-handed! I figure this is the sort of thing that I’m just better off conforming to the right-handed way of doing it. If I’m ever going to just pick up a guitar anywhere, it will be right-handed.

Or, case in point, these lessons. If I was playing lefty, I’d have to translate everything over to the other hand. I don’t need that complication!

So, just like golf. 99% of players golf right-handed, regardless of what hand they are. I golf and play hockey righty. I throw and bat lefty. Go figure.

Session 1 Topics

In this session, we’re learning the strings. Let’s see if I can do this: E-B-G-D-A-E. I think that’s right.

Next is a lot of fingering exercises. each finger up and down the strings: first finger, first string, second finger first string, etc.

Finally, we learn a few chords. C and G7. This is really tough. My fingers just don’t do this sort of independent activity.

It should take about a week to do this lesson, of at least 15 minutes a day. I’m shooting for at least 30 minutes total per day.

By the end of 30 minutes, my left forearm is cramping and my fingertips are killing me. They better toughen up soon!

Restringing the Guitar

I cannot start anything until I restring the guitar. The E string (the bottom one) was broken and I just decided to replace them all.

So I stopped by a local music store and said, “I need new strings for an acoustic guitar, steel please.” I immediately admitted that I’m a beginner and he asked about my callouses on my finger tips, and whether I had any. “Baby’s bottom,” I said.

So he went straight for what I can only assume was the wimpiest strings there is and handed them to me. “These are great strings, nice and soft.”

Once I got home, I looked online for a tutorial on how to restring a guitar. There were some pretty specific instructions, but it wasn’t that complicated. I managed to do it entirely during an hour-long conference call. The one bit of advice that I didn’t realize until it was too late was replace one string at a time. Taking all the strings off a guitar is risky as there is so much pressure on the guitar when strung, it might warp when completely un-strung.

Too late for that! Though I don’t think there was any harm done.

The Learn & Master Guitar Package

Today I opened up the Learn & Master Guitar package. Here’s a look at what’s inside…

A booklet, about 20 DVDs and some CDs with music to jam to. Flipping through the booklet, I realize that it is realistically going to take a year to go through this. I guess I can’t expect to master the guitar in any less time than that!

Lesson 1

So of course I cannot wait and I pop in the CD and follow along on lesson 1 with Steve Krentz from Nashville, TN (if you’re going to learn guitar from someone, they might as well be from Nashville.) I’ll save details for my next post, especially since I couldn’t even get through it. Let’s just say that there is nothing soft about these new strings!

Ouch! My fingertips are screaming.

One of my few regrets in life is that I never learned to play a musical instrument.

I just turned 42 years old this past week. It may be too late.

When I was in first grade, my teacher played the guitar for us. I remember vividly her playing Cat Stevens’ “Moon Shadow” as well as “Eddie cucha catcha camma” (some nonsense song). I don’t remember much from back then, so clearly this made a profound impact on me.

Since then, I’ve admired greatly anybody who can play a musical instrument. So many people can do it with such apparent ease. But a guitar feels like a tree trunk in my own hands.

Now I’ve got three kids of my own. I would love to impress on them the importance of music and if I can play an instrument for them, that’s the best shot they’ve got of “getting it”.

I don’t need to tear off a rock-and-roll guitar solo. All I want to do is to be able to strum a guitar and sing some songs with my kids, and maybe give them some visibility into how awesome it is to be able to create music.

Is that too much to expect from myself?

I got a guitar for Christmas two years ago. Apparently, I’ve been talking about this for a few years and my wife got me an inexpensive, but good quality (according to the Amazon reviews), Takamine S35 Jasmine acoustic guitar. She knows me well enough that it probably wasn’t a good investment to go all in and spend a grand on a great one.

So here we are, guitar in hand. And on my 42nd birthday I decided this is the year. So I acquired the Learn & Master Guitar training course from Legacy Learning Systems and I’m on my way.

I’m calling my birthday (Jan 28, 2010) “Day Zero” in my journey of learning to play guitar.

This blog is one of those mental games you play with yourself. Declare a goal out loud to make it real, and all that. I’ll chronicle my progress here. I hope you’ll follow along.