My musical journey

So its been 4 months since I started to get serious into learning guitar. I've had my cheap stratocaster since I was 15 and only passively played. It's not my first instrument - recorder, flute and singing. The first was at primary school and was only taught passively by one teacher...whom I'm convinced hated me. Flute was at secondary school but, apart from my distaste for his teaching method, I found the second octave painful on my ears.

Singing was a strange thing. In primary I couldn't sing. I barely squeaked a raspy "note". Often I kept quiet during assembly and "singing lessons" with the same teacher as before. Classes were often grouped..mainly focused on getting through the song than anything else. I was often teased about my voice.

However, after a bout of depression and at a point where I found my faith, in secondary I joined the Junior choir. It was slow but I worked on the songs and enjoyed the group. A year later I was old enough to join the Senior choir. Due to lack of members these where soon joined into the Gospel choir. Was also had a Staff choir who'd occasionally join us. I was also asked to sing in the county school choir and even sang in assembly in front of my year group. The first time I made a fool of myself because I was very nervous but I redeemed myself the second time. It earned me a lot of respect; even with the popular kids. Outside of school I also joined the church choir in my village, which was a different style to what I was used to but, it pushed me to sing almost daily.

But after I left school a second round of depression took the joy of singing from me. Understand that depression takes your world, chews it up, turns it upside down and spits it out in the dirt. It was only until I heard Nightwish's Storytime (November 2011) that, for the first time in 5 years, I sang. It was raw. Don't get me wrong. Singing is hard work and you won't become good over night. Same with any instrument. Also if you don't keep that hard work up your muscles will "forget" the movements needed.

So with my background in singing and reading sheet music has helped towards learning guitar. From what sources I've used so far there's not much focus on that. It's been more learning chord tabs. So I purposely looked up what scales are used in music and then found images showing where the notes of the scales are on the fretboard. I started with the most basic: C Major (A minor is written the same way).

C Major is simply all the whole notes: C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. No flats or sharps. This also helps when learning to read music as all the gaps spell: F,A, C, E and the lines: E,G,B,D,F. I always remember FACE by "someone showing a face" or "the gaps are the face of music". EGBDF, however, I use a less polite version: Every Good Bitch Desires Fudge. The idea is to find something that works for you. Maybe "Eternally God Beats Devil's Fury" works?

C Major in 1st position (Image from Guitar Friendly)

The above image is from here: http://www.guitarfriendly.net/guitar-scales-lesson-for-beginners-major-guitar-scales/ . If you'd like more info on C Major and other positions on the fretboard that page will give you plenty to work on for awhile. They said a position per week...I've been at it for 4 days now and I've gotten to 3rd position just going from top (1st) string to bottom (6th) string. It's mostly a case of learning these positions and know what note they are. Having something visual has helped quite a lot. I'm very much a "monkey see; monkey do" kind of person - especially when learning music! That said Guitar Friendly is a great blog for learning guitar and theory.


Finally, because this has been a long post to both read and write, to sum up my relationship with music and the reason why I continue to play:

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life ~ Berthold Auerbach