Song writing and some final reflection...

I feel like I'm now ready to compile songs and start to fiddle around with my guitar and create anything on my guitar that my fingers desire. Although my amp isn't working now I was fortunate enough to record a snippet of a song idea before it was destroyed that I titled "1928." I would say this little ditty is going to evolve into a full-length song once I buy another electric guitar amplifier and can continue working on it.

I started by hitting the G chord and then hitting the E chord. This created the intro to the potential song that will be heard on a blank cd that will accompany this blog.

Now fast forward to the present day and I've come up with two more snippets of songs. The first one is called "TabsandChords" and the second is called "Final Stage." Both of these songs are acoustic sounding and offer up basic sounding guitar strumming and finger picking. "TabsandChords" starts out with me awkwardly strumming on all six strings to try and create a twangy sort of sound... hopefully you can notice it.

For "Final Stage," I went with this idea of putting two completely different sounding guitar parts in the same song and it comes in at the 38-second mark. The first 37 seconds are finger picking on a total of 4 different strings. I really enjoyed playing this particular part of the song because it was great finger picking practice and that's the area where I need to work on the most.

After coming up with the guitar parts I open up Garage Band and began to record. Since I wasn't able to record directly into my computer from my guitar, I used the microphone function, which basically picks up overall sound in the room. I think the sound quality was decent and was good enough considering that my amp was broken.

I messed up a lot in coming up with these tunes. Sometimes it would be due to strumming to many chords or I'd flat out hit a wrong chord and it would ruin everything and I'd have to start over again. I played for about 30 minutes and then tried to come up with ideas for a new song but nothing really materialized.


All in all I had a great time playing the guitar and all the lessons I've learned. I'll definitely practice a lot more during summer to really hone in on my skills and polish them off right.

Technique Fundamentals and The Caterpillar

There's a few things you should know about guitar playing techniques. Whether you're a left or right hand player the same rules still apply. I'm a right hand player which the more common way to play so I'll start with the right hand techniques first:

Right hand rules:

-Have fingers anchored to the body of the guitar.

-Have the correct grip on your pick

-Always alternate your picking finger by strumming down (the usual way) and strumming up. This will make things easier for you when it comes to playing. And remember...TAP YOUR FOOT! this will insure that you're keeping the right timing when you play.

This exercise was a little boring for me so it'll probably be the least interesting of all my recordings. I essentially just played every string separately, going up and the down the guitar neck. The video is below:

I know it's not the best playing you've ever seen but I thought I performed decently. My next step was to practice what is called the "Caterpillar," which is an ideal way of improving your overall playing ability. You basically start on the "E" string which is the first string closest to you when looking down at your guitar and you place your four fingers minus your thumb on the "E" string and move each finger down to the next string one at a time. This is hard because the trick is to play each note without removing any of your fingers until they are needed to play another note. I must have messed up the first couple attempts but below is a video of me getting the hang of playing the caterpillar...sort of:

My next and last blog will include commentary on the guitar parts I came up with and recorded. It will also include some reflection on my experience in trying to learn how to play the guitar.