Friday, December 31, 2010

Guitar Lessons 3: A-chord-ing to My Records...

...I am very bad at making puns.

I started becoming less motivated recently, which caused my complete calluses on my middle and ring fingers to start peeling. So I figured I'd try it again. Eventually. Then my dad bought me some books on guitar playing, including one of just chords. I was already trying to play Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" but it was somewhat a hassle because I could only search how to play the chords via YouTube. Now there's a book I can look at. Books FTW!

However, I am finding that transitioning from a G to a C multiple times throughout the song is quite difficult. First off, the G chord is a hard chord in general. You have to keep your ring finger on the sixth string and your pinky on the first on the same fret. If I do play it semi-right, my pinky finger gets sore fast. I'm hoping it also develops a callus soon.

I am finally getting the rhythm of the song down. While that may be true, transitioning is vital when you want the song to sound well like the song you're trying to cover.

Also, after I get this Ring of Fire down, I can start playing several other songs too. Did you know a lot of songs use pretty much the same chords? I know, right? Who knew? So after Ring of Fire comes Mad World. Mad World's difficulty I think will come in strumming, since it is originally a piano song. The chords are simple, and most I know already, but I think the strumming won't just be all six strings at one. I'll probably have to fiddle with it to get it right. That, or look up covers on YouTube to see how their rhythm is. I'll probably do that latter.

In other news, I can pretty much play Whole Wide World without pausing now. I'm not sure how good it sounds, but it's better than when I first started. That's all that matters, right?

Goals for Next Blog Post:
  • Getting a callus on my pinky finger
  • Progressing at Ring of Fire 
  • Playing the G Chord better

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