#3: A little Turbulence

Progress:

Blog post #3 woohoo!! Two weeks ago, I worked on building my muscle memory to move along the fret more comfortably. I did this by doing runs of the coordination exercise from my previous blog post. Even after practicing this exercise a good amount of times, my coordination is still not at par, but I'll eventually get there!! After practicing the basic skills of guitar playing, I decided to apply my knowledge of open chords with my practice of hand coordination. To achieve this goal, I watched the second guitar lesson video from the same guitar instructor on YouTube. In this video, the instructor taught me how to read simple tablature and two familiar songs that are easy to play:

Wild Things and Amazing Grace

From this lesson, I chose to focus on learning how to play Amazing Grace since I'm more familiar with it. When the instructor showed the sheet music for this song, I was very taken aback since I've never seen this type of sheet music before.

For the past 7 years, I've always read from regular sheet music with a clef that has five lines. Now, I have to read from tab music. I had to search the term tab music online since I didn't know what it was and discovered the advantages of this type of sheet music. According to the website I found, tab music makes it easier for guitarists to interpret the music as it indicates where they should have their hands on the fret board. Overall, it was very strange for me, but I'll eventually get used to it. It took me a while to be able to play Amazing Grace, and of course, it's still bad since I'm a beginner, but here's a video of me playing through this song!!

Reflection:

What i really struggled with was shifting between open strings and strings that required pressing down on the frets. In the first phrase of Amazing Grace shown in the picture above, I had to transition between the open B string and the G string on the second fret. Since I'm still not familiar with visually knowing the placement of each string, it was confusing for me to know exactly where to place my fingers. My bad habit of only stroking down the string is still a recurring problem. The instructor stated how upstrokes are used for upbeats while down strokes are used for downbeats, but I still unconsciously used down strokes. I also need to work on learning a whole new different key signature. Like I said earlier, I've been used to reading regular sheet music that has a five line clef from the beginning of my flute playing journey to now. Throughout my time learning how to play the acoustic guitar, I still spend most of my time playing the flute since it's my main instrument and I have to practice it for band, especially since it's marching season right now. I've been used to reading the ledger lines of sheet music as "E, G, B, D, F" (Every Good Boy Does Fine), so how long it'll take me to memorize tab music? I don't know, but of course with dedication, I am certain that I can pass this checkpoint!! Also, I didn't necessarily focus on my tone quality while playing Amazing Grace since I was just focused on getting the notes down and correcting myself when I realize I just stroked downwards. That's my next goal though, to play with a good tone quality, so tune in next time!!