jorgemac
Forum Replies Created
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1 & a 2 and 3… 4
Some days I’m a strummer, some days I’m a finger picker.
Some days my fingers won’t listen to me.
Some days I’m a slide guitar king and a few minutes later I can’t fumble through a chord change.
Some days I can hammer on, pull off, slide into or out of a progression.
Some days I can slap the out the melody with a percussive beat.
Some days My fingers get in the way like 2 left feet.
Some days I can pick a melody by ear.
Some days I just land on my rear.
I am an evolving guitar player… And life is pretty darn good.
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A metronome will help as you can in crease the tempo slowly and strum more accurately as you build up speed.
In practice, I always work out my fingering for chord progressions before I practice them and run through them a few times , just moving the fingers from chord to chord for a few minutes, no strumming just fretting finger movement. I see how much speed I can work up and sometimes use the metronome with out strumming, just calling out my note count on the metronome beat- 1, 2 and, 3, 4, etc. This prep work helps me mentally as well as physically.
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I once saw a paraplegic while attending a Giant’s baseball game bussing outside of the stadium using his toes to play a slide guitar. I was amazed at his will to play and was happen and honored to contribute to his guitar case fund. Never say never was the lesson I took away from that.
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you are one of the shining lights of this website and it is always wonderful to hear from you. As I always say to you you, hang in there and keep on chugglin.
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Welcome to our picking world. I use CDB cream To relieve the pain. Also Chinese metal hand exercise balls and a Therapeutic squeeze ball. All of these help enough that I have fair to good dexterity most days. 10 – 20 minutes a day when I wake up and before bed at night.
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James Shipway’s books are better than excellent and he can add humor to his, that is always welcome in a “boring” knowledge learning explanation. Good choice. I have his books also. Both of these do a great job of explaining the ” mystery ” of keyboard knowledge.
One of my many guitar roadblocks is I sometimes allow my ego to get in the way as I am just too “good’ of a guitar picker to “need” anything but a very fast review of fretboard knowledge so I just lightly read and skip area’s that, could, actually help me become a better guitar player.
I skip exercises as I am above that level(not). Today is Monday and I almost skipped practicing Tony’s lesson as it was below me. What an stupid reaction to a learning experience. Then I did the lesson and actually had to slow down as for some reason(lack of practice) , lack of concentration maybe) My picking wasn’t very smooth. This forced me to take the proper time to concentrate on my up/down and down/down strokes for about 20 minutes to correct this error. I am my own worst enemy during guitar practice sometimes.
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This is a great primer book to use before you decide whether to enroll in the fretboard wizard course. The FW course would probably give you more hand’s on information and visually explain all of the examples available in this book and go into everything in more detailed depth.
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Hey Matt, I’ve been through it a few times and each time the exercises get easier. I just did chapter 6 exercises while watching football today and came to the realization that those exercises did more to allow me to stretch my pinky that almost anything else I tried in the past. Hope it helps you understand the fret board a little better. If u are dazed and confused the 1st time through just start it again as soon as you can are comfortable with it. I usually go through it in an afternoon, a couple of times a year, now and always pick up some little tidbit that I missed before.
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Gotcha, Every one of us will swear that we are playing the very best string available and each of us know we are absolutely correct in our string judgement and ya know, we are…
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Pete I agree with you as I haven’t seen any daily/weekly lesson involving public domain songs. I think we study a wide variety of popular music from artist’s that I, mostly, have admired. I give Tony credit for evolving the song selections from the sites beginning roots where there may have been more of a bluegrass or country feel to the songs. I actually would be fine with some more of that. I would even tackle a simple classical piece just to change things up.
Another thing to mention is if you play a 1, 4, 5 and relative minor progression you are not required to use the same version of those chords. I use minors, sus, dominant and diminished chord tones all the time just to give progressions some more texture and tones in place of major chord tones all the time. I take our daily lessons and change them every day as anyone who follows my comments knows. We just played the Jimi Chord on Friday. hard to find a better chord progression than that, even if it is a minor dominant 7th with an added flat 11th tone. That definitely isn’t boring. If all I had were potatoes to eat I would be bored but if those potatoes are au grat’n then we are flying high.
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One of my many guitar teaching books is Fret Board Freedom by Troy Nelson. It is set up like our lessons where you play a lick a day but it has 7 days a week lesson and the same lick, same note, are played in different positions on the fret board. It is set up to be 1 lesson a day for a year.
It does help you recognize that there are different positions on fret board that you can find the same notes to play the exact same lick that your started Playing on Monday. It does use the caged system to help explain how you can find all of these positions. It was very interesting and I have revisited the course probably once a year to just brush up on different lick shapes.
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I strung the Santa Cruz strings up on my all mahogany larrivee Custom -03 and wasn’t excited about the tone. All of us know each guitar either likes or dislikes the string set you put on. It’s like they(the guitars) have their own personality can reject or really dig a set of strings. Guitars seem to have their own personality and can accept or reject that “special” new string set you know will work wonders on your guitar. So strange.
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Hey Marty,
welcome and hope you learn to enjoy this site as much as so of us O.G.’s do. If you are new to guitar you will want to start out with a set of strings that you can learn to hold down next to the frets that don’t discourage you to think this is too hard and you stop practicing. Start out with a fairly light gauge string. 10’s or 11’s. You are going to get blisters, just a rite of passage, and start to form calluses. At the early learning stages the brand isn’t real important until you start to form an “ear” for guitar tone.
The Yamaha FS or FG 800 is a good 1st guitar. If you can afford to have a set up done by a local guitar tech. It will help you progress faster. as you will not be fighting the guitar, but learning to play the guitar. Make sure he shows you how to string up your own guitar so you don’t have to pay extra every time you change strings.
It is like a zen thing to me and I change strings at least once a month, but I’m weird. Most people go a lot longer that that between string changes.
Do some google research on guitar strings. Every guitar picker will swear to you that there brand is the best string to buy. I string all of my steel string guitar with D’addario XT strings and they are the best . Just saying. Good luck
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Good question. I think you would want to have a clean pick attack. No interference from your fingers. Because I use the index and middle fingers to hold the pick on the backside I did have to make some adjustments to have a clean attack angle, The said I sometimes do allow the middle fingernail to stroke some of the downstrokes just to achieve a different tone when striking the strings. I’ve worked on this especially when muting strings by lifting the fret fingers up slightly so that I achieve that muted string tone.
So If you are allowing the finger to touch the string and it isn’t affecting your tone you are cool. I think I would make adjustments and see what kind of tones you can put together by adjusting that finger. You might invent a new guitar tone/technique. Who knows.
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Hey Skyman, I agree that less is moh bettah(Hawaiian saying) when exposing less of the pick. It seems to be easier to control with only a small portion of the pick used to strike the strings. I was just practicing muting and it is much easier to use just the middle fingernail down stroke if the pick doesn’t get in the way, less pick exposed means less chance for a muting error.