jumpinjeff
Forum Replies Created
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I will throw in a trick that I learned from Pete Huttlinger. Play as loudly as you are able, followed by playing as softly as you are able. Go back and forth. Helped me to understand how the strings and my pick interacted.
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@albert_d : Congratulations!! You have come far! You will go further!!! You have found the key to success. Wonderful inspirations in your Q & A! Alice’s restaurant is part of my guitar origin story. I had a teacher who would play this for us an make up his version with us as characters and use the plot frame but change it so it entertained 10 year olds. My, my we had fun with that song and I became even more convinced I was going to play guitar. There were two guitars on the wall you could play anytime and there was one in a case you needed to ask permission to play. It was an exceptional year in my recollections.
Glad to be sharing space on the music road with you! Keep your stone rolling!
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Turn on this track and listen to it. Listen carefully to it. Pick up your guitar and find one note that sounds good the whole way through. Start moving off of that note in rhythmic patterns with one other note. Keep changing that new note until you find two that work well and play that for a while and so on and so on. Alternate between your First note that sounds good everywhere and the others always coming back to your first Root Note. You should tune your guitar to 435hz if you are going to use this track to learn on.
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Hi Laurajean, I like the suggestion of the bar chord, skills course: super to get to the little things that matter but hard to see at the beginning. Such as….take a moment and figure out what strings are being barred by your “Bar”. Most of us expend way to much energy pushing on, squeezing strings already covered by other fingers. Take the Bar F for example. The low E , the B and the High E. Try making the bar without fingering the chord part, just bar the Low E the B and the High E and figure out how to make those notes ring out (don’t play the other notes just the three that the bar covers.) You may find that by directing pressure with a little practice, you don’t have to wear out your hand to make a bar chord. I think Tony demonstrates this in the bar chord course…and if he doesn’t…., well,…. he should. (I think he does). : )
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Hi Ron, I wish it were a simple thing but it is really a time and effort game of muscular training that will allow you to do this. There is a “5 day Challenge” in TAC that deal directly with this. These were the most physically challenging exercises I have encountered anywhere. Critical to work these slowly, without tension (and it is going to be difficult to pull that off at first) but they also yielded the most dramatic improvement over time. The way fingers are engineered, they just don’t stretch away from each other on a spread very well on their own. You must train to fire those tiny hand/ wrist muscles in a circular pattern to get them to seemingly stretch apart on their own. This “5 day finger stretch challenge” specifically trains that. There is another skills course that is a stretching course (located under the “Basics” heading in Skills Courses but that is not what you are looking for). You want the “5 day Challenge” “finger stretch” found in the Skills Course section…..watch out for the Wednesday Challenge. It still makes my eyes water : ) These are really great fun!! “5 day” is used repeatedly. It can be confusing.
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TAC taught me how to play all the songs. Learning songs is why we go through the prep to be able to play them. I needed years of prep before I was ready to play the songs I desired to play. TAC uses songs to train you how to play the guitar but it leaves the finger choreography to those more suited to teaching that. I spent a year trying to learn finger choreography before I joined TAC. The only thing it made me was frustrated and determined. TAC was the fix.
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Hi @Rickva , you have identified one of the hardest things about learning how to play guitar: psychology. Your psychology is ready to get it down pat….your fingers and hands and elbows and shoulders are not. Training the body to be ready for what the mind wants to do is TAC’s super power…..while engaging the mind in a sneaky way. Every time I put the guitar down in the past was because of the disconnect between body and mind. Mind was ready to go go go…body was not.
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Without keeping time go slow very slowly. See if you can slowly make to reach. Mess around with your hand position and see what different things allow you to do in the reaching department. Most of my initial trouble was trying to go too fast, too soon.
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Nicely done @Marky !
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Hi David @TWTX , this is a great question and the answer is super fun: think of where you move pick in relation to the sound hole as your effects pedal for acoustic. Plunk the string at the 12th fret and then again by the bridge. Where you play is where you like the sound being made. Lastly integrating changing that tone in a call and response way by playing by the bridge then answering above the sound hole and vice versa, is one of those special sauce things that can take playing scales into new fun territory. This is one of the concept I did not have to force….just knowing it was there made me want to find a way to utilize it.
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Yes! look for it in your favorites. You can play them anytime you like so you’ll never peeve.
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Why do you play guitar Moh? In getting to the bottom of that, we may get to why you don’t like guitar practice. Logically, I would say that practice delivers you from the buzz and thuds you don’t like. But art is not always logical. I remember when I first started learing here I would get super frustrated that I could not play like Tony or even remotely resembling what Tony demonstrated. It was not until I realized Tony had been through his own learning process twenty years prior and had been playing for 20+ years. Once I appreciated his learning effort and result I respected my own effort and became comfortable with the learning part of being a practitioner of guitar playing.
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Sounds good Ron, I encourage you to make this a practice. pick one. learn it by memory. do it every day, several times, short sessions. When it gets boring pick another one and do the same. When you have them all in your memory it really gets fun.
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Not lost: you are in the exact correct place. All the sign posts are in a foreign language. Keep going….it gets easier as you learn the new language.
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that is cool stuff right there @SoCal_Ian ! I did not know this.
Great example of determination exemplified!
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This reply was modified 1 year ago by jumpinjeff.
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This reply was modified 1 year ago by