Played it till my fingers bled. (Guitars in general)

Member Name: Johnny Phoenix

Product:	Guitars in general
Date:	18/06/02 (633 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Rewarding, Fun

Disadvantages: Hard

Motive
******
Since I was a kid, I’ve always wanted to learn to play the guitar for different reasons. At first it was to impress the girls at school. I dreamed of singing and playing in front of the school assembly starting off with a slow ballad that crashed into an energetic soft rock Bon Jovi style song. There was only one thing standing in my way, a complete and utter lack of talent.

Every time I saw a guitar in someone’s house I would pick it up and strum away completely out of tune, but trying desperately to adopt a look of total concentration so that I looked like I knew what I was doing. Sometimes, pride would move my hand to stroke my chin and force me to say, “hmm, it’s a bit out of tune this”.

Equipment
********
Finally, last week, I decided to finally buy myself an acoustic guitar and try to actually learn properly. This time not for girls, not for entertaining a crowd, not even for adulation but just for myself. So I bought an old six-string down at the five and dime (cash converters) and also an electronic tuner. Experienced guitar players might say “lazy git” at this point but I am so bad at music, I didn’t even know what the notes should roughly sound like.

I also bought a beginners book and a plectrum, which for those who know as much as I did last week is a little plastic pear shaped disc which is held between thumb and forefinger to stroke the strings with. This gives the sound of the strings vibrating a much sharper sound than using your fingers and its easier to stick it between the strings if you have thick fingers like me.

The electronic tuner, which costs about ten pounds, is a really useful bit of kit, it is about the size of a calculator with a hole in one end to pick up the sound and a LCD display. The idea is you play the first note and the display tells you which note is being played and how close or far away it is from being in tune
. If the needle goes to the middle whilst the string is sounding a green light comes on to tell you it’s right. If it is off, the needle either goes to the right or the left of centre by varying degrees and you gently adjust by either tightening the string or slackening it until the note hits the middle. You repeat this for each string and the display shows the notes in order of the strings so you know what note you should be looking for. It is surprisingly easy even for a total novice.

Learning To Play
*************
Once I had my guitar tuned, I opened the page of the simplest book you could hope to find on learning to play and began to read lesson one.

This is normally the point at which I start to lose patience in learning because all the “learn to play…..” books assume that you understand something about music. This one simply entitled “Acoustic Guitar – Lessons 1 –5” assumed that you were a complete idiot as far as music was concerned which was fine for me.

Obviously you begin by starting with individual notes. Within the first paragraph you are combining simple finger movements to alternate between different notes on the same string and before even the end of the first page, you are making music. The feeling you get when you are actually playing notes that you are aiming at rather than strumming away in complete discord is great, your confidence begins to increase as you realise that it isn’t as hard as you thought it was going to be.

End of confidence – start of hard work
**************************************
Once you get through the first few lessons, you get to chords. Chords for the layperson are when you use your left hand fingers to hold down the string between the frets (the strips of metal on the stalk of the guitar) and play multiple strings all at the same time. This is when the guitar playing begins to sound really cool, but it starts
to get hard as you have to switch between chords and playing individual notes quite frequently, accurately and speedily to make anything worth listening to.

This is where I realised that I am going to have to put in a lot of practice to ever be any good at it and that is why I have found new admiration for those that can play the guitar well, because it is not a lazy mans hobby.

What can I play….I play the Guitar
****************************
So far I can only do the first two lines of Jingle Bells, the first line of Happy Birthday to You and the first line of Love Me Tender, but I am practicing hard at a very rewarding but hard new hobby. I recommend it heartily to any who have considered picking up the guitar, as long as you are prepared to work at it.

Summary: