Guitar Lesson 3
Last week Friday marked the third guitar lesson. There is a layer of cracked skin on my left hand fingertips. Perhaps I’m building the calluses up too much? While I can play longer, which is a godsend because I have six songs to practice, it is harder to feel the strings. What little aptitude I displayed was proof of my continued practice, which I think pleased my instructor.
Pleased so much, that she was going to try to introduce three songs. Unfortunately, we barely had the time to go through two of them. The first was This Land Is Your Land. Finally, a song that I could sing to! I knew Yakety Yak and liked it, but never took the time to learn to sing it (of course, now I have to). When I practice at home, I just focus on the measures and haven’t paid enough attention to the progression of a song. Now, I’m trying to find youtube videos of the songs I’m learning and attempt to play along.
The second song was Take Me Home, Country Roads. Instead of really playing it, she introduced a section of the song that’s really hard to play. Every song previous had a consistent four beats but this song has one chord at two beats and having to switch so quickly was mind-boggling. The third song she gave me was Under The Boardwalk. We didn’t get to start on it but I fiddled with it a little bit this past weekend. With the two new songs, she introduced two new chords, E minor and A7. There’s also an F chord in the chorus of Take Me Home, Country Roads but she said we’d tackle that later. Along with the new chords, I also learned a new strumming pattern.
I didn’t expect things to be going this quickly. We’re now at the point that for the sake of time, we may have to play snippets of songs for review each session and even omit an entire song. I’m pretty happy about the quick steady progression but am a little afraid. I’m getting the chords down okay and can mostly switch quickly enough, but I have yet to really get good enough to solidly place my fretting fingers and my strumming still needs work. I guess that will all come in time and it’s better for me to continue learning new things in the meantime instead of stagnating on a handful of chords and songs.
