petelanger
Forum Replies Created
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I worked hard to get the F-mini barre down. It seemed it was always coming up in the chord progressions and was keeping me from playing songs. Getting it down seemed like a rite of passage.
In retrospect I don’t feel that learning them is all that important. Now that I can do it easily I wish I has just played the Fmaj7 instead (ignoring the high E string entirely). There are other options besides mini barres that might be used in place of them. If I were teaching my child I would have them play the other easier substitute chords while they gradually learn the full barres in all the CAGED shapes.
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Very nice! Intricate fingerpicking while singing is not easy. Sounds great!
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@adodekendoyahoo-co-uk
Yeah, no starting point in TAC. You’ll find Tony gives you “the lay of the land” several times throughout the year because people are joining throughout the year. You’ll find the challenges vary in difficulty from week to week. Use your time wisely, if you can knock out a challenge quickly then go back to other challenges that stumped you. Don’t forget to favorite your lessons that you think you want to revisit so you can easily return to them!
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Welcome @ChrisN !
You’ve done well to document your journey on video, this will play huge dividends! You’re sounding great, nice work!
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Hi @Rocktopus,
I’m a 2 plus year TAC veteran and member of multiple other sites. What I’ve learned over the past nearly 3 years is that breakthroughs come in multiple sizes. Most of the time they’re tiny w’ittle, w’ittle baby-steps. These you can find regularly if play close attention – you do that thing slightly better than you did yesterday. I always called them nuggets and in the beginning that’s all I had because I was terrible back then, I could do the Thursday/Friday stuff at all. But after a while I began enjoying those days more and more. You can’t let whether you knocked the daily lesson out of the park dictate whether you’re having fun learning guitar or not. You gotta look elsewhere.
We all want to instantly get better but the reality is, most of us improve very slowly. Try to get 1% better each week. Did you know that if you could get 1% better every week, your growth compounds to about 1.01^52 ≈ 1.67 after a year — so you’d be about 67% better than where you started.
I have found this to be absolutely true, by playing every day (or at least 98.5% of days) I have easily improved more than 50% annually.
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I’m still around too, just not on TAC as much as before. Glad you still have the same number of bone pieces as you did a few months back! I’m making great strides in my playing by focusing on chord change and strumming drills and going to jam sessions.
I’ve been playing through a bunch of songs, one of these days I’ll post something over here, after I have my new guitar set up and get used to playing it.
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There’s no “preparing for the daily challenges”. Each week is a self contained lesson, to some degree even the daily lesson stands alone. Some weeks are harder than others, so depending on when you join, you might find things more difficult as a beginner. You just do what you can and mark complete. After time you will be able to do more and more. Topics repeat and actual lessons repeat. It works well if you stick with it regularly for a couple of years. I’m not doing the daily lessons regularly any more, but I did them faithfully for 2 years. I learned a lot, but now I’m focusing on other stuff. TAC gave me a great foundation, and I still pull up lessons all the time.
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I do a good amount of my guitar time in front of the TV. It’s great, time flys and you can just repeat chord sequences over and over until you get them down. I don’t think I would have ever learned to play a song if I hadn’t started “practicing” this way.
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Would like to offer assistance but I can’t visualize the problem: “my pinkie lays flat (pointing toward my other fingers). Would you be able to snap a photo or take a short video?
I recall when I started out in TAC and was learning the G chord with the pinky on the #1 string and the ring on #6 and it was completely undoable. I pinky was on strike big time. For several weeks I was doing mostly MO – WE challenges because I was not able to do much of what was shown at the end of the week. I would go back and repeat the earlier stuff. But I kept trying to do that 3 finger G and a couple of months later I was able to do it
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@shawb0531gmail-com what @ScottM describes is basically it. Hammer ons would begin with a string that is already sounding and then you alter the note to a higher one by thrusting your fingertip quickly near the fret wire. You can start from a resting string as well, but not sure that would be called hammering on, I think of that as “tapping”. It’s important that you move quickly (like a hammer), if you don’t the sound get’s muted.
From the TAC skill course library: https://tonypolecastro.com/lessons/hammer-ons/
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@Moose408 created a spreadsheet that lets you access all lessons and I took that and created a website: https://tac.bluesy.top/
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@marion white thank-you for your service!-
This reply was modified 2 months ago by petelanger.
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This reply was modified 2 months ago by petelanger.
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This reply was modified 2 months ago by
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Love it, Terry! 🙂
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When I joined in July 2024, at the page where you select the program they had the lifetime option right next to the annual. I picked annual but then a couple of months in I asked support why they make you choose if you want annual without even a trial and I was told I could convert to lifetime. So I said, heck yeah! I had to pay for lifetime and then they refunded the annual payment immediately.
I think it was offered for a little while after I upgraded, don’t know exactly when they cut it off.
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@Skyman911 I’ll be missing you! You know where to find me!