Lessons with Ares1020

Sup dude. Alright, we spoke about the goals you had before, but I want to make it a bit more official:

So I want you to make me a list of three things you wish to accomplish. Once you do that, I'll begin giving you stuff to do. :D

I want to understand what I'm doing when I play a chord. And Why it sounds good with some things and bad with others.

I want to be able to hear a song and have a good general idea of whats is happening musically.

I want to open up the fretboard because as it is now I'm only playing open chords and the bare minimum of barre chords.

Aight! This should be easier than Ouchzilla's D inf. (For random people reading this, Ares and I will probably make a lot of obscure references.)

When it comes to most things, I feel that a good solid foundation in theory leads to a better understand of application. Therefore, half of what we do together will be mental work while the other half will be the physical.

When working on the theory part it's important to take time to study what I give you and ask questions when things become muddy. Also, I have a habit of only guiding people in thoughts, I will never make that bridge for you to connect ideas, but I will tell you when you are finding that bridge.

When it comes to the actual practice, it's important to be more observant. Paying attention to how your hands is position, the way the strings vibrate, and the your overall musicianship will be more important than simply doing the exercises I give you.

With a combination of hard work and consistent boring stuff, you'll get to where you want to get pretty quickly.

I'm going to go ahead and get started on this: We are going to take a ground up approach and I'm going to assume you are ignorant of everything.

Also I'm going to be giving you 3-4 chords per week and asking you to figure out songs that contain those chords. After you accumulate enough chords, I'll eventually just give you a song and tell you to figure it out the chords. Later on we'll move to melodies.

Okay sounds good! And don't make fun of Ouch too much!

Just a quick note on the things that I "know" but don't understand.

The D E and A chords, and the G C and D chords feel like home to me when I'm just messing around but I don't know why. D-Am-C-Em also feels right. G to A feels like.... like a stretch... It works but there's tension. I don't know how to explain it. Haha maybe I'm dumb.

Anyway those are about all the chords that I know how to play (not counting ones that I've had tabbed out but never actually learned what they were).

So, now that you know you have a HUGE noob, where do I begin?

?go #duel ?

I just want to inform you that I've been recently contracted to help NSA and CDC on a problem. I'll try to get back to this asap, but right now, this takes priority.

Swine Flu? You loving super agent bastard!

Why does everyone assume that! I could be working on something like growth rates of pineapples or why my sl is so bad (that's a matter of national sec.) But like I told you in the chat, I'll get your stuff posted once I figure out how to notate stuff.

We start this with some fundamental. We write notes with seven letters:

A B C D E F G

Between any two notes there exist sharps and flats except for B C and E F. Therefore to obtain the full 12 notes we write:

A – A#/Bb-B-C-C#/Db-D-D#/Eb-E-F-F#/Gb-G-G#/Ab-A

Here # means sharp (sharps raise the value of the note) and b means flat(flats lower the value of the note). We should notice the “enharmonic” here. Notes like A# and Bb are enharmonic because they are the same note but with two different names. The reason for the different names will come out later, but for now, it’s better to memorize the notes.

Another point of interest is that we start with an A and finish with A. The physics behind this is that the second A vibrates twice as fast as the first A thus produces a different form of the same note. We call the second A an octave of the first A. If we were to add an A# after our second A, then we could say we have that that A# is an octave of the first A#. And this goes on.

So here’s something for you to work on:

*Check the notepadfile*

After you've done what is on the notepad, I want you to listen to this song:

YouTube - america playing horse with no name

I've given you four chords. 2 of those chords are the only chords used in this song. I want you to figure it out. Secondly, I want you to focus on the strumming pattern and learn it.

Edit:Ares pointed out an error in my txt file. I wrote A string when I should've wrote D string. Just replace A with D and it should be smooth sailing.

Ex1.txt

Alright I've done it for the most part. I still need to work on the fret note association but I'll get it down. Also my guitar is kind of old and sketch so the 12th fret buzzes like a bad speaker no matter how I play it.

Is the America song

Em then whatever chord 200200 is?

Hey BD just checkin in, hope everythings goin alright. See as soon as you started helping out they calmed down on that whole virus thing. Although there were 4 cases in the little town im living in...

Keep fighting the good fight!