Overture (End of Week 1) | Post #1

🎸Musical Background🎸

Music has always been a large part of my life. From banging on a toy drum in my basement at age five, to learning to play the trumpet at nine, to starting the guitar last July, learning music has been a necessity. While making music has been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember, I could never hold interest in any specific instrument for longer than a few years. Even though I have only been playing the guitar for around seven months, I have found more joy in it than any instrument I have ever attempted, and I feel that it could become a life-long passion of mine.

Currently I can play intermediate guitar songs using strumming, basic picking, and fingerstyle. I have played songs in difficulties ranging from Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple, which contains arguably the easiest riff ever written, to Tears in Heaven by Eric Clapton, which is an intermediate fingerstyle song. I can read Tablature and play along with it for the most part. I can often completely learn an intermediate song in about three weeks to a month and a half depending on how much free time I have to practice. Tears in Heaven, which is in my top three hardest songs, took about five weeks to fully master. Generally I try to practice for one to two hours each day, meaning that I spent roughly fifty-two hours learning that song. I will have about seven weeks to learn the difficult song, meaning I will spend about seventy-three and a half hours just learning how to play it and practicing.

                                         Basket Case- Green Day

🎸Goals🎸

Across the duration of the next seven weeks, I plan to learn multiple difficult guitar techniques such as Barre Chord Manipulation and Hybrid Picking. Barre Chords are when you use the side of your index finger to press down all six strings while you use your other three (thumb is not included) to finger chords. Barre Chords are difficult because not only do they require an immense amount of accuracy with chord shapes, but they are also strenuous to the wrist. Also, I plan to learn a technique called "Hybrid Picking" which is where you play using a pick and your fingers at the same time. It is a mixture of picking and fingerstyle, both of which I am fairly familiar with. I also plan to improve my chord changing speeds, since currently I struggle with transitioning from certain chords, and most difficult songs require quick and precise chord transitions.

Ultimately, I want to learn a difficult song that incorporates the various techniques and to memorize it. I am leaning towards learning the song Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin, since Jimmy Page used all of the techniques while making and playing it. In addition, it is extremely recognizable across many parts of the world. It is a great song to show off your skills, as long as you are not in a guitar store!*

I plan to measure my progress in a few different ways. I will use a metronome to measure my progress each week with the chord changes and the picking speed. For the Barre Chords, I plan to track the improvement on the number of muffled notes. As I improve, my Barre Chords should become cleaner and crisper, with fewer muffled notes. Lastly, I plant to measure my memorization on how much of the song I can remember without my Tablature, and how accurate the memorized notes are.

                                        

                                          Tears in Heaven (Compound Intro)- Eric Clapton


*Stairway to Heaven was a must-know song for guitarists in the 70's and 80's. The song became so overplayed that many guitar stores banned it resulting in a jab at the song in the popular 1992 movie, Wayne's World. Since the movie's release, there has been a running joke within the guitar community about the dangers of playing Stairway to Heaven in a guitar store.

Works Cited

Meslow, Scott. “‘No Stairway! Denied!" The Inside Story of Wayne's World's Most Uninte.” GQ, GQ, 14 Feb. 2017, www.gq.com/story/no-stairway-denied-waynes-world.