Day 1

Here's the philosophy behind this: Do things, and you get better at them. 

1. You don't need music training to get your hands on an instrument and make noise
2. When you get your hands on the instrument and make noise, you build muscle memory. You teach yourself where the frets are, where the strings are, how you like to play. Your instrument teaches you the things that only you and it can know.
3. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers.
4. When you play, you build a relationship with your instrument. When you have built that relationship, should you ever decide to play more seriously, you will be miles ahead of the you in the other universe where you never started playing at all.

The ideal setup for this is to have your instrument tuned and turned on, sitting how you would like to play. Being tuned means your ear can start learning the relationship between the strings. If your instrument is electric, being plugged in and turns on lets you learn what it sounds like when it's on. Sometimes it matters. 

All you actually need is an instrument with frets and at least one string.

So let's jump right on to it. Tonight's lesson is fingered exactly the same, no matter the instrument. I'm going to be taking bass picturtes, becuase they're the clearest to see what I'm doing.

So let's get right into this. Playing takes all of your fingers, so let's use them. 

First finger=index finger, second finger=middle, et cetera.
When I say "lowest" and "highest," that's always a reference to pitch, not physical height. Lowest pitch/thickest string is also the first string.
The first fret is the one closest to the head/top of your instrument. 

So, here you go, first finger, first fret, lowest string. 

Today's has got a pattern that you'll pick up pretty fast.

Second finger, second fret, lowest string. 

Third finger, third fret, lowest string. 

Fourth finger, fourth fret, lowest string.

Well, now you're out of fingers, so

First finger, first fret, second string. 

And so on. Up frets, up strings.

When you're out of both strings and frets, Start back at the beginning, but go first finger, second fret, second finger, third fret, third finger, fourth fret, fourth finger, fifth fret. And so on. Keep going until your index finger hits the 12th fret. Go back down if you're feeling it. 

Even if you've been playing, we've got a tendency to not use our pinkies.

In the future, the shorthand for things like this is going to look like this: 

I'll probably still explain them. 
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PS I fell asleep while editing this last night, so here it is today.