I stopped writing this blog for a few weeks – hence the briefness of the last entry and the need for this multi-week entry. I have a natural creative drive – hence my passion for music, reading, writing and now playing the guitar. When the passion is strongest I can come up with a lot of ideas – songs, blogs, articles, theories and guitar riffs. When it is weakest I find it hard to come up with anything – I don’t read, I don’t write, I don’t listen to music and I don’t spend much time playing the guitar.
During the week I practise the guitar towards the end of a long day – generally about 14 hours after I have got up. As such I am usually incredibly tired and find it hard to concentrate. Thankfully my determination to learn the guitar has meant that for all but a handful of evenings, I have practised the guitar every day for the last 3 months. This week contained one of those handful of days – I just got home, sat on the sofa, ate my dinner, watched TV, had a shower and then went to bed. I didn’t even think about playing the guitar.
The next day’s guitar lesson was performance-wise one of my worst ever. I was tired, out of practise, stressed out and in the process of developing a cold. My confidence was next to zero but thankfully Max recognised this and was encouraging. This week’s practise was Smoke on the Water – one of the most famous guitar riffs ever and one that millions of people have played on the guitar. Whilst it is instantly recognisable and easy to play, it’s not really the sort of thing I want to be playing. I don’t want to learn the guitar to play famous rock riffs – I want to learn the guitar so that I can write my own songs. I understood why Max gave me the track though; it is mainly 2-note power chords, then some 3 note power chords, a simple picking riff and then finally the return to the famous riff. The reason why I was given the piece was because although I could play all the parts on their own, I now need to be able play a whole song from start to finish.
I left the lesson with instructions from Max to practise a couple of the Rock School pieces I liked against the backing tracks he had given me. The aim of this is to improve my timing – something I particularly struggle with – and to therefore improve my playing so that I can play a whole song from start to finish, not just parts of it. I tend to fumble through the more difficult parts of songs, so that I can soon get back to the bit I can play well. Like it or not, if I want to get any better I need to practise the parts I can’t play well, and also practise moving from the easier parts to the harder parts and back again.
Two weeks ago it was my birthday – hence the title of this blog piece. For a while now I have been a man who it is hard to by presents for – I don’t want anything and anything I want I have got already. Now I have a pretty serious hobby, it’s no surprise that the vast majority of my birthday presents were guitar related. Of these I got a guitar stool/stand (I have needed another stand since I bought my acoustic guitar), the Justin Sandecoe beginners songbook (which I asked for – it has simplified chord only versions of popular guitar songs), and a pack of chord cards (my favourite present). The chord cards are great and I highly recommend them to anyone learning the guitar. The 52 chords show a different chord, the fingering positions, and very helpfully what chords they go with. I have spent a lot of my practise time over the last week and a bit practising different chord sequences and alternating my strumming – my favourite one currently is A minor, C, A minor, C, D minor, G, E minor, A minor. I also enjoy strumming along to A, D, G, E.
The other thing Max showed me this week was a slightly simpler but more complete version of Smells Like Teen Spirit. I had struggled with the first version a few weeks back and gave it up due to frustration. The hardest thing for me is the timing of the famous riff – I really struggle with that and so Max spent quite of this week’s lesson getting me to play over again until I played it in time.
Something I have learnt from learning the guitar is that I am not a naturally gifted musician. I love music and have a creative brain but music does not come naturally to me. This is why my three previous attempts to learn the guitar and my one attempt to learn the keyboard have failed pretty quickly. Now I am older and having faced what I call my quarter-life crisis, I have the determination to finally do something that I have always wanted to - to learn the guitar. But it’s hard work.
Thankfully despite the many negatives there are many positives. I am getting better –particularly at playing chords – and this has been recognised by my girlfriend. The improvement is very gradual and impossible to notice on a day to day basis but I’m heading in the right direction. It’s hard to recognise that sometimes, especially when confidence is low and tiredness is high. But thankfully I do – I’m not going to give up on my ambitions just yet.
