Learning Guitar: 6 Months Later

So here we go. Those of you just tuning in, clearly you were not impressed with my previous months of guitar blogs. Sooooo… Pshht. Don’t be expecting me to go over it all again.

Being the kind generous soul that I am, I’m gonna point you back to my previous episodes:

• Learning Guitar Week 1 & 2: The Before Time and the Battle for Strumming and Rhythm
• Learning Guitar Week 3 & 4: More Complex Strumming + Chords
• The Guitar After 2 Months

For the rest of you, welcome back! I’ve been practising very little. So not much to talk about. In truth, talking to my teacher, he suggested that at absolute minimum I need 1 hour of practice per day – which I’m not getting. And in-fact, to start becoming good something in the order of 4 hours per day – probably more. Lets get started.

1. Rhythm Training

When practising together with Lao Liu (my teacher), I find myself starting on rhythm and then slowly oscillating around around the correct rhythm and finally ending by not listening and following my own rhythm! The audio below is a count with rhythm to help with strumming at the right rhythm.

I’ve found that most people who have had music training from a young age often don’t realize just how much knowledge they acquire about the basics of rhythm and pitch. My ability to clearly recognize pitch and rhythm is somewhat like that of a child trying to multiple numbers without knowing how to add.

2. Strumming Patterns

The following pictures and audio show a set of strumming patterns combining the downbeat and upbeat. Here the X represents muted strings and the O represents an open string without strumming.

The below audio is a single set of 4 beats followed by a pause.

The below images and audio are an example of strumming over the entire 8 beat period.

3. Strumming and Chords Together

With the strumming figured out above, we can then use the strumming pattern with the muting of the strings at beat 3 and 7 in the picture below.

For this we can use the A chord and E-minor chord as shown below.

Playing this should sound as follows. Listen for the E-minor and A.

Playing a couple more times for reference below

4. Learning La-Bamba

At this point we can now start to incorporate the strumming into a real song. In this case below are the chords for La-Bamba. Only three cords required.

I found myself struggling with the F and G chord. So a simpler way to play the chords above is as shown below.

The video below shows the process of changing chords between C, F and G.

Now playing this sequence of chords with strumming included slowly it should sound as follows.

Speeding this up somewhat. This is what it should sound like.

From here we can add the remainder of the tune for the tune. The following sequence should be plucked with individual strings pressed for Do (1), So (5), Mi (3), Fa (4), Ra (6), So (5).

Now looking at the string sequence in video here is how this should look after recording.

The full tune for this sequence is shown below with repetitions and strumming shown on top of the numbers.

Pulling it together with the chords as well should sound something like this