dr_dave
Forum Replies Created
-
Very solid and confident You’re always within the chord. Nice little surprise at the end with a bluesy note, carefully placed. I don’t know how much you had to rehearse this, but it sounds like your fingers know exactly where to go! It might just be that this melody is something that just naturally calls to you and you have the ear and discipline to play it so perfectly.
-
Checking back to see if you have any clearer picture of how TAC best meets your needs. What has been working well for you?
-
“So the bottom line is that I am kind of floating around without a clear path on what I should be doing. I know there is a lot of terrific content to explore but does anyone have a compass for someone who is drifting and could use a little direction.”.
Stay the course. Hang in there with the dailies. Also, after you do your daily lesson, try to play something you like every time you pick up the guitar.
If any of the dailies strike your fancy and you think you do want to practice it more, don’t forget to click on the favorite icon. This will make it accessible to you even after this month’s lessons disappear.
-
“Do I just give it a go, hit complete and move on to the next day?”
Yes – precisely. The daily exercises are targeted at building skills over a long haul. There is roughly a year’s worth of lessons in the can. They repeat. You will be much better at any given exercise when you see it approximately a year later, even though you might not have practiced that specific exercise in many months.
Don’t expect the relationships between lessons to be obvious. But actually things you practice on other lessons will help your ability to play this lesson, more-or-less subliminally. It’s not about learning specific licks, scales or chord progressions – it’s about learning the skills and developing the muscle memory and dexterity that make it possible. You learn much faster by practicing different things day by day versus trying to get good at one thing before trying something else.
Doing different challenges day after day makes you better at doing many things. Doing the same exercise day after day might make you good at one thig – or not. You may just be bored to tears!
-
Here’s the diagram that I can’t type because the editor alters the spaces between characters.
-
This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by dr_dave.
-
This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by
-
Here are some important ideas. A scale is any collection of notes into which we divide a fundamental interval that we have come to call an “octave.” An octave interval is the difference where the higher pitch is exactly twice the frequency (cycles per second, or Hertz, abbreviated Hz) of the lower note.
In what we call “Western Music,” we divide that octave interval into 12 tones. Take a look at a piano or any other keyboard. There is a repeating pattern of white and black keys. All the white keys have letter names, A through G. There are seven white keys before the pattern repeats, starting the next octave. The black keys are the “in-between” tones that we designate with either sharps or flats, depending on the “key” of the music.
12 frets define an octave on a guitar. Pluck any open string, then play the same string fretted at the twelfth fret. The string will vibrate twice as fast and the nite will sound an octave higher. (It is not a coincidence that the twelfth fret is halfway between the nut and the saddle – that just physics of mechanical vibrations!) The musical difference in pitch between adjacent frets on a guitar corresponds to the pitch difference between adjacent keys on a piano.
“Key” is an important concept you will learn in Fretboard Wizard. It is the name of the note toward which the song pulls or “resolves,” and most songs end on the note that names the key. It gives a real sense of completion or arriving “home.” Songs that end on some note other than the key leave a sense of unfinished business or suspense, sort of like an unanswered question.
If we use all 12 piano keys or guitar frets in order, we call that a “chromatic scale.” But rarely does music use a full chromatic scale. Chromatic runs are sometimes used as an embellishment in parts of a melody, but most of a composition usually uses a smaller subset of pitches for the “scale” to which the music is set.
Two of the most common scales are the “major scale” and the “natural minor scale,” each consisting of seven of the 12 pitches. In FW, you will learn that the natural minor scale derives from the major scale, using the same tone but just using a different starting point for the “home” that defines the key center.
So if we select only seven if the 12 tones, how do we know which ones to pick? The intervals between adjacent tones in any major scale always have the same relationship, regardless what key we have.
Let us start by defining whole steps and half steps. The smallest interval on a piano is two adjacent keys. The smallest interval on a guitar is one fret. These have exactly the same significance. We define a whole step as a difference of two frets (or two keys on the piano), therefore a half step is just one fret.
Now, all major scales have the pattern W-W-H-W-W-W-H, where w = Whole and H = Half. Let’s think only about the white keys on a piano. If you you are not familiar with the names of the keys on a piano, browse that on the web. The major scale that uses only white keys is the key of C. The “relative” natural minor scale that uses the exact same keys is A minor, and it begins on the same note that is the sixth step of the C major scale, namely A. I’m going to wrap this up by saying that the pattern of notes for the natural minor scale is therefore W-H-W-W-H-W-W. Hopefully this diagram brings it home:
(Edited to add: Naturally my diagram is a failure because of the editing software. What you see when you compose is not what you get when it posts. I will illustrate the old -fashioned way and then post a photo. I just hope it will allow me to do that.)
C major: C D E F G A B (C)…
Interval: W H W W H W W W H
A minor: A B C D E F G (A)…
The pentatonic scales choose only five of the notes. (Pentagrams have 5 sides.). The A minor pentatonic uses A-C-D-E-G(-A), where the A in parentheses denotes the beginning of the next octave). The C major pentatonic uses C-D-E-G-A-(C). Again, these two scales use the same notes, simply with a different starting point that defines the key center or sense of “home.”
-
According to William “Grit” Laskin, he is the originator of the “Laskin” bevel or armrest, though few people seem to give him credit for it. Here are some web pages from a couple luthiers who do:
http://www.berkowitzguitars.com/bevel-01.shtml
https://www.wingertguitars.com/detail-spfeatures.htm
If you are not familiar with Grit Laskin’s work, you should be. In addition to building gorgeous lute family instruments, he plays Northumbrian smallpipes, guitar, mandolin, bouzouki, concertina and fiddle too. He has written and recorded some really nice tunes. I have several of his albums and met him once at the Group of Seven Guitar exhibit at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. He is a class act all around.
-
Wishing you peace and comfort through difficult times and the strength and courage to pursue, through your music and all aspects of life, opportunities to celebrate the memory of your husband. Shared music had to be among your best memories. Although he won’t be next to you playing, if you listen hard enough with your heart, you’ll probably hear that drum beating along with your music.
-
Sweet. Very clean, and right in the pocket.
-
Darren – you epitomize what TAC is about, i.e. having serious fun with the guitar. Your musicianship is apparent, and your great sense of rhythm and harmony accelerate your progress to be sure. Few people will make the great strides you have done in such a short time, but the main thing they need to embrace is that sense of fun and adventure that you project. Thanks for sharing.
-
The daily lessons are the meat and potatoes of the course – literally the potatoes this week: mashed potatoes with a boatload of gravy and buckets of butter. What is likely confusing to most people is that some of these exercises are very hard and don’t seem very “beginnerish.” Because people can’t “master” them in 10 minutes, they think they are in the wrong place. But they are not in the wrong place after all. You don’t need to play these exercises very well to derive benefit. The benefit comes from doing the best you can with them with a modest amount of practice. Even if you can’t play them very well, 10 minutes of focused practice on each day’s lesson is quite sufficient to build skills over time.
Learning to play guitar is fun, but it is hard fun. That’s one what makes it addictive. If you are the sort of person that needs to have instant success, guitar is not where you’ll find it. But if you stick with the program, you will have small wins. Over a period of time, the small wins will add up and you will gradually come to a point where you can play many of the daily exercises at least at a slow speed. At first, you might get only pieces of them. That’s good enough. To be able to play songs that are worthwhile, in my opinion, requires many small wins to come together. Fingers need to toughen up and learn where they need to be on the fretboard, your picking hand needs to learn to synchronize with the fretting hand and eventually come to a point where you’re not requiring conscious thought to direct every move.
If this is not the right path for you, I wish you luck in whatever you choose. You reached out to your peers in the community via your post. (“Community” is your fellow members, not TAC staff.) Is there anything we can do to help you on your journey? As for ice cream, the best I can do is send it virtually. I hope you like French Vanilla – I find it goes best with the fresh blueberry pie I am including.
-
Very nice.
-
Sorry to hear about your injury. Best of luck with that and hope to see you back here soon.
-
My introduction to the Northumbrian pipes was c. 1980 – either Ged Foley playing with Battlefield Band or Grit playing with Stan Rogers. I honestly can’t remember which was my first experience, as they happened around the same time. I also got to see Ged later on a number of occasions when The House Band played at our local haunt, Godfrey Daniels.
That is such an expressive instrument. I have seen a few YouTubes of Kathryn, and she plays them wonderfully!
-
@Crabby said, “A C Chord is made up of an A note, an E note, and a G note.”
@campfire – I’m sure Crabby meant to say that a C chord contains the notes C, E and G rather than A, E and G. Just a typo, I’m sure.
I’m going to add some more thoughts that might help you, but please stop reading if any of this makes your brain hurt!
The first C chord most of us learn is the open C, for which we fret the A string in the third fret (producing the note C), the D string in the second fret (producing an E) and the B string in the first fret (producing a C note that is an octave above the C we have at the third fret of the A string). We also play the open G string and the open high e string, the latter producing a note pitched an octave above the note at the second fret of the D string.
But there are Cs, Es and Gs all over the fretboard. (Note: it’s a fun exercise spending some time to learn where the C is located on each of the six strings, then the E and then the G on each string.). Any time we play a chord that has only the notes C, E and G and we include at least one of each, our ear will interpret the resulting chord as a C major chord. It does not matter where those notes are located on the fretboard. It does not even matter what note is on the bottom (the lowest note). Our ears can interpred it as a C major chord because we hear all three required notes for that “triad” and only those notes – nothing extra thrown in that would produce new “colors” of sound and force us to name the chord something different.
When we sound an E-G-C with the E as the bass note, theorists call that the “first inversion” of the C major chord. If the G is the lowest note (G-C-E), they call it a “second inversion” triad. This is a lot of technical speak and more than you need to know. What you do need to know is that any chord that contains at least one C, at least one E and at least one G with no notes that are not C, E or G, it is a C major chord, regardless where on the fretboard those notes are being played.