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11.01.28: Jimmy Learns Music, Blog 4
Written by Jimmy
The latest blog of incompetence, sloth and stupidity. Feel good about yourself. Feel very, very good.
Part One: Update on the Journey:
A focus day. All on guitar trying to catch up to where my friend David, of Next Level Guitar told me I should be. I came no where close to catching up, but am now steadily working on all open chords, tons of sus 2 and 4′, add 2 and 4’s intended to be peppered thru my songs, a few new strums using 16th’s, a couple fingering patterns and THE F’ing F chord. And I’m supposed to be doing songs, so I focused on American Pie, which went hiding in the mist of my horrible chord changing.
Part Two: Useful Tips
Again, other than my advise not to be me if you care at all about music, this section is always pretty short. What the heck can I possible offer anybody? But, here goes:
1. Mastering the F Chord: As you now by know, I use Next Level Guitar for most of the lessons. But I just couldn’t get the F chord from David’s little video. So I explored on line and found a really good little clip. This helped me more than Next Level Guitar, because he really emphasizes hand positioning. Well worked for me. Given me thirty to forty minutes and I’ll give you a perfect F Chord. Less than that and I’ll give you a really really dead sounding F Major 7th.
2. Start Songs Write Away: Next Level Guitar sells a set of DVD’s that give about an hour of instruction for a single song. I did American Pie today, and while I’m miserable at it, working on a song forces you to try to pull it all together. And I love the little sus thing going on around the D7 in American Pie.
Part Three: how Is It Really Going?
- It Doesn’t Come Together At All: I wish it did. David said it would. It doesn’t. There are now four things going on in my room, each completely independent of each other. First, my foot is going up and down on a one and a two and a three and a four. Second, my strums are going d/d/u/u/d/u/d. Third, my chord changing are going roughly in the order that David is recommending, but the chord changes are hitting all sorts of land mines. Fourth, there’s a lovely song out there called American Pie. But, the foot don’t match the strums, and the chords don’t match the foot or strums and the song, that lovely song, don’t got NOTHING to do with what else is happening in the front room. I mean absolutely nothing.
- I’m getting tired of things getting chewed up: It is bad enough that I’m destroying lovely songs more efficiently than Simon Cowell sucks my daughters into voting in X Factor. But to add insult to injury, and clearly in a conspiracy with the musical gods, Lewie the little Guinea Pig cock-a-poo (I’ve called him both!), sneaks into the ‘music room’ 3 times a day to eat a pick, then a chord page, then a pen used to market down chords. I do think Don McLean is behind this. And by the way, I think it is sad that when you google American Pie you first get all those movies, and only after first page do you get the song (I’m sensitive to this because if you google Abuibilla Music you get that damn bird – and for the record I goggled American pie because I didn’t know how to spell Don’s last name).
Part Four: Useful References
This is where I keep a running log of all useful websites. But I didn’t really add anything, so I’ll wait until next week to do something. Instead, let’s leaving you with how it was supposed to sound this week:
And because I mentioned Come Together, I felt you needed that as well:
that’s it. Peace and Happiness, or, Peas and Happenstance if filtered thru my guitar.
Jimmy
