Monday 22 April 2013

The first lesson

My first attempt at learning the basics of guitar techniques, simple chords and strumming proved to be more difficult than first anticipated. It was however, very successful! I first researched some sites on google that would help me to tune my guitar by ear (I don't own an electronic guitar tuner) and tuned the very out of tune and out of use guitar. It took me a while to tune my ear to which way each string needed to be turned but I think I tuned it reasonably well in the end.
I then found another site- guitarlessons.com that had some great reviews from people that had used it to teach themselves, like me. It provided twelve short video clips on the basics of the guitar including how to hold the guitar properly, parts of the guitar, strumming technique and four basic chords (G major, D major, A minor 7 and C major). I made my way through these videos, feeling a little disappointed seeing how good the man in the video was compared to me. His fingers seemed to be moving at a hundred miles an hour compared to mine and he said he was playing slowly! I practiced each chord many times over so that my fingers got used to the movements, which helped a lot. Once I had been through all of the videos, I found that I was able to play the chords much easier and my fingers were automatically doing the movements when moving between chords.
Now all I have to do is keep practicing and hopefully I will be able to play the chords one after the other without pausing in between each.
Learning to play the guitar is going to be much harder than expected but I am determined!!

xoxo
rachelandtheguitar

Tuesday 16 April 2013

Monday 15 April 2013

OT and the Guitar

I thought I should probably explain why I am learning the guitar before I start posting about my guitar lesson antics!
I am currently studying occupational therapy and have been given an assignment for one of my papers called occupational science. The assignment involves learning a new occupation that I am familiar with but have little/no experience with and should be of interest to me.
I have been playing the piano since I was 8 (I am now 20) so have a lot of knowledge of music and love being able to learn new songs and perform for friends and family for fun. I have however, always been a little disappointed that my parents made me learn an instrument that isn't so easy to find and carry around (I think this may be impossible with a piano?). Because of this I have wanted to learn an instrument that is a little more versatile. The guitar has always seemed to me, like an instrument that is always available, is able to be used in many different situations and quite a lot of people can play it. My dream is to sit around a campfire on the beach at nighttime eating marshmallows and playing campfire songs (with me as the talented guitar player). This influenced me to choose the acoustic guitar as my chosen occupation for my assignment.
I presented this to my classmates a few weeks ago and promised them that I would perform the song in front of them at the end of the year with a fellow classmate who has also chosen to learn to play guitar. So now I have to learn a song that will entertain and hopefully wont be to hard for me to learn by the end of the year! I don't know if I have gotten myself into an impossible situation or not but lets hope that my musical background will help me through my feat of learning the guitar!

I will be posting in this blog occasionally to record my experiences with learning to play and maybe some different websites, sheet music etc that I have come across during the process.
Thanks for reading!
xoxo
rachelandtheguitar