I spent a good chunk of my first week of practice doing some research on proper learning techniques and some of the road blocks I should expect to encounter as I progress. Needless to say, what I read was quite overwhelming. I didn't have any vain notions going into this that I'd be able to learn the guitar without a lot of hard work. Still, reading about the daunting road that lay ahead made me feel quite apprehensive.
This must be what it feels like to climb Mount Everest
I spent the rest of the week playing and replaying the chromatic scale just to get basic technique and posture down. I was honestly surprised at how...difficult it was to play a such mundane scale. On paper, the chromatic scale seems like the easiest thing ever, but there were several issues I had to deal with. One of the big things that annoyed me to no ends was that sometimes the note wouldn't sound right, despite me fretting and plucking the correct string. At first, I wasn't sure if this was due to my poor technique or that something was wrong with my guitar. Turns out it was because I wasn't fretting the string hard enough. That seems like such an obvious solution and I read numerous times that one needs to fret the guitar pretty hard. The thing is, I thought I
was fretting hard, but it turns out that
fretting the guitar hard enough meant pushing down on the string to the point where its literally cutting into your skin. Also, since I used to fret with the meaty-ish part on my finger instead of the very tip, I had problems where I would unintentionally mute the string below.
Just practicing my fingering, nothing to see here
I have since cleaned up these nuances, but they were kind of small, silly things that could have been fixed within 10 minutes if I had someone point these out to me. I probably should invest in a teacher, but its kind of rough right now since its midterm season. Perhaps in the future.
Things I learned/worked on:
- Tuning
-Posture
-Fretting
-Strumming
-Chromatic scale
Current rank: Guitar player wannabe
