Day 21

Did you have fun playing all those random arpeggios?

Guess what's up tonight!

MORE OF THAT

Okay. Theory again. Sorry. God, I"m bad at living up to the name here.

The notes with the letter names we've been playing are all part of something called the major scale.

I'm not going to talk about whole steps and half steps because you can get that anywhere. We're gonna TALK ABOUT FRETS.

If you're fretting an E, the next fret up on that string will be F. Always. If you're fretting an A, the fret after the next one up will be B. Alwaty.

So here's the circle, over and over. |-| indicates a fret you skip.

|a|-|B|C|-|D|-|E|F|-|G|-|A|-|B|C|-|D|-|E|F|-|G|...

Got it?
Good!

B and C are buddies, E and F are buddies, everyone else likes their personal space. Or something. Remember it how you can.

And this applies for everyone who's playing a fretted instrument (except dulcimer. Dulcimer's fretted differently. Dulcimers take skipping a fret a step further and just don't have that fret. Diatonic instead of chromatic).

So, you know the names of the strings on what you're playing, right?
Ukulele, you're probably gCEA or GCEA
Bass, EADG
And Guitar, GDAEBe. Which, if you go high-pitch to low, Easter Bunny Gets Drunk After Easter.

(Baritone uke gets Easter Bunny Gets Drunk and bass has Get Drunk After Easter. And ukulele gets...guhSEEEUUH. Sorry. That's how I remember it. gCEA spells guhSEEEEuuuhh.)

Okay. Now you know your strings. Pick one.

Let's pick the G string, because it makes me laugh inside to say that.
Look up at the head of your instrument with the tuners. The thing that separates the part of the string you play from the part of the string that's being wrapped around the tuners is called the nut. I've probably said that before. I don't know. I'm not an expert. This isn't even a real car.

So pretend the nut's a fret. It looks like a fret, it's parallel to the frets. You're good.

If it helps you remember, lightly put your finger on the tiner-windy bit of the string. Then play your open string. The note your string makes when the string is open is the name of the string note.

This lab coat has someone else's name on it. I don't know what's in this beaker.

Now, start counting. If it's yoru G string, you'd skip the next (first) fret and your next fret is A. If you're playing your G string (haha), the second fret will be A.. Now keep going. Find all the letters on the whole string.

Then do that thing from last nigth on that string.

Then cry over how much more you know than you knew.

Then try to get some sleep.

Day 20

We made it this far.

Okay, here we go.


|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---

|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---
|-F-|---|-G-|---|-A-|---|-B-|-C-|---|-D-|---|-E-|-F-

The notes on the low E string. Ukulele, pretend you have different tuning or sit this one out.

You're going to memorize those.

Start by playing it up and down and up and down until you think you have it. You should also start listening to see if you can hear the difference in the tones.

Now, on each note, play

|---|---|---|---|---|---|

|---|---|---|---|-X-|---|

|---|-X-|---|---|-X-|---|

|---|---|-X-|---|---|---|

Starting lowest pitch and working your way up.

Now, take each note in the following sequences, find it on the fretboard, and play that sequence (it's a major arpeggio, if you care). Then on to the next note. 
Try to not look at the fret diagram up there. The ideal is that you just memorize where they are.

So here's your sequence:

AEFDCBG

AEFBDCE

AFEAFBGDF

ADFEE

AEFGDBA

FEDCBDG

AEFGBDF

EDFBG

FBDFCB

BDBF



If you're wondering how I got those sequences, the answer is keysmashing on my number pad and then doing a find and replace. They don't represent actual frequencies of the note bine used or anything






 

day 19

Accept that sometimwe you have a bad day

sometimes you work really hard

and when you're done you just dont' feel like playing.

And take a break.

Day 18

Bassists: bad news for you. Or maybe good news.

You're going to need to know more music theory than most people, to be able to play with other people.

Here's a quick, dirty, and oversimplified way to know enough music theory to be able to play along with people.

Other instruments, follow along, because this is useful to know.

When you look up chords on ultimateguitar or the JoCo wiki or wherever you're getting your chords from, you're going to see text and letter names above it. Like

           Em                     A                             Em    B Em  
I've got a regular problem so my standard break from life is in order. 

Where the letter above the word changes, the guitarist changes the chord.
(This is probably review for everyone. just hang with me)

Notes have names. Chords have names. The notes on your fretboard have names. You need to know all of them. Most of them. At least these.

|G|---|-A-|---|-B-|-C-|---|
|D|---|-E-|-F-|---|-G-|---|
|A|---|-B-|-C-|---|-D-|---|
|E|-F-|---|-G-|---|-A-|---|

I hope that diagram makes sense. The |X| is the nut and the open string name and every | is a fret..

So. That's your thing for tonight. Get to a point where you can find all those notes, without having to stress about it. You don't need to be good at it. Just get the idea in your head, or be able to count up those letters. Play it up and down and over and over until you start to remember where the frets with the letters are.

Don't care about theory? PLay it anyway. Up and down and up and down, tose frets, until your fingers fall off.

Guitar and ukulele, keep up with that strum practice from last night. Get really good at that. It'll help you later. Getting really good at switchign between G and Em? Throw in A.
|-0-----
|-0-----
|-1-----
|-3-----

|--0----
|--3----
|--3----
|--3----
|--0----
|-------

And keep up that strum thing until you're really good at changing chords in that half-beat. There's never going to be a time in your life when you go GOD DAMN IT I'M REALLY GOOD AT CHANGING CHORDS IN THE HALF BEAT.
So you have that going for you.
Which is nice.
Sleep well.

Day 17

Let's get back in the swing of things.


For you guys playing chords, let's do this:

Earlier you learned the G Major chord. I don't think I said the name, because this isn't a music theory blog, but there you go.

|-3--
|-0--
|-0--
|-0--
|-2--
|-3--

|-2--
|-3--
|-2--
|-0--

Barritone ukulele players, play the ukulele fingering. Because your instrument is tuned differently, you'll be playing a D Major chord.
The chord doesn't matter. This isn't about chords. This is about making your fingers do things.

Even if you've played this chord a million times, and you know how you always play it, just humor me here.

Take the pad of your thumb, and put it in the middle of the neck, at about the same level as the fret.
In other words, if you're playing ukulele, if you could drill a small hole in the 2nd fret in between the C and E strings, and go straight through your neck, you would hit your thumb.

Don't wrap your thumb around the neck. Don't lie it flat. Just get used to playing that chord with your thumb right there. This isn't the most natural place, and it's probably not going to be your usual place to put your thumb when you're playing G.

But if you're learning new chords, or ever having trouble switching from one chord to another, try playing with your thumb right there.

When we play, sometimes we all have a tendency to want to anchor our thumbs somewhere and not move it. This is a normal tendency that everyone has.

If you anchor your thumb in an imaginary plumbline down the widthwise center of the neck, you can reach more strings and more frets than you can with any other thumb position.

Other thumb positions are not necessarily wrong. When you are doing something that makes it impossible to put your fingers where you want to put your fingers when you want your fingers, then you're doing something wrong. Other than that, go to town. Do you.

So, you've got your G major chord, your finger's in the middle of your neck, and you're happily strumming a D DU UDU or something. In fact, do that. Get your beat going. Now slow it down. Keep your beat, keep those gaps where there should be gaps.

Now, in between that last U and that first D of your new repeat, change chords.
We're switching to Em
|-0--
|-0--
|-0--
|-2--
|-2--
|-0--

|-2--
|-3--
|-4--
|-0--

As far as  cowboy chord changes go, this isn't the easiest. It's going to involve picking up a lot of fingers and putting them down. Go as slow as you need to.


Honesty hour: I'm crap at this, That specific strum pattern, and big chord changes, I never do it right. I cheat, and do this trick where I lift my fingers on the last up strum, muting the fretted ones and letting the open strings ring. It's not a good habit to get into. This is an exercize that's really hard for me, honestly. Switchign between two basic chords while keeping a simple strum repeat seems really easy. It's a lot of the basics of playing guitar/uke is all about, and it's really easy to do well enough to play.

But if you're on a quest for improvement, half of it is trying new things, and playing the new things until you go from being not good to being not as bad, to being better. And the other half is looking at the things you do, and asking how you can do them better. 

And a really important thing is to remember that when you feel like giving up, is to say, okay, today I'll fake it. Tomorrow I'll quit. And to keep finding the strength to fake it one more day at a time, until you end up with the motivation to do a day where you aren't faking it.

Bassists, stick around for tomorrow, because I'll have something. Something.

dAY 16

Tomorrow's another day and I dont' want to give up on this project.

I guess that's sort a metaphor for how learning an instrument is. You do things, even when you don't feel like it.

You've got to play even when you don't want to

Even when you ahve other things to be doing.

Even when it's boring.

You're spending time with your lute-family instrument of choice, and you're learning about it.

So tonight's not the normal kind of lesson we've been doing.

Your homeowrk tonight is to listen to music. Pick a song you sort of like. Not you favorite song, but that song you hear on the radio a lot that you don't hate.

Now listen to it. Count it out. Break it apart. Listen to the bass. Listen to the guitar. Listen to anything that's not what you normally listen to.

Then go back through the lessons, find something you remember not coming to you really easily, and play it slowly, Play it over and over, for ten minutes or more. Focus on getting it right, not getting it fast.

Learning is about repeating.

Tomorrow won't be a repeat of today.

Day 15

What goes down, must come up.

If you remember, our annotation for strumming is currently
D D D D |D D D D |

And if there's no beat on a sttrum, your arm moves anyway.

Well, sometimes you play on the up strums too.

Keep doing your down strum steady beat from the other day.

When you strum down, your hand has to come up. If you strummed up on each of those strums, it comes out to

DUDUDUDU|DUDUDUDU

(Which, when read aloud, sort fo sounds like the inside of my brain right now)

The key to strum patterns is just to move just enough of those around so that you can keep the beat, but whoever's listening doesn't get bored,.

Remember to hear the beat in your head. Remember to keep the down strum on the beat.

Here's a couple to dip around with:

D DU UDU|D DU UDU
This one's my personal crutch for 4/4 time. The part where you skip playing the third downstroke makes it sound all cool and interesting, but it's easy to play and works for a lot of songs.

D DUDU|D DUDU
This one's for 3/4 time (I'll explain time signatures later because they're important but I really just want to go to sleep. The cheat version is to take the number of D strokes in a repeat and it's probably that number over 4)

D DUD DU|D DUD D
Here's another easy one for 4/4 time

DU UDU U|DU UDU U
This one's funky seeming until you play it, but it's bright and funky and Easy
And 4/4

Practice all of these (and then check some more out if you want). One of the secrets to not sounding boring when you strum is to master the thing where you don't always play the down stroke.

I'm so tired. Real post tomorrow about stuff and things.
Good night, and trust me, you're better than you think you are.