Newbie geek strums #4

Further on the Mewbie Geek Strums theme...

Well, progress has been slow but the journey is proving its own reward

• I can now bludgeon my way through some simple strumming three-chord trickery. I can hobble through some alternating base flat picking and some simple finger-style patterns.
  
• I now understand why the E Chord is called that even though it does not involve touching either of the two E strings :-)
  
• I now have a basic understanding about the relationship between chords and scales.
  
• I now understand why Homer Simpson playing with a group called the B Sharps is amusing.
  
• I can see faintly on the horizon how I might eventually be able to do barre chords by taking advantage of the fact that there isn't a single barre chord shape that I have come across that actually involves clear ringing on all six strings at the same time from the index finger. I sure wish more of the tutorial stuff would point this out.
  

Now for some gripes

• Music notation seems to have the worst case of operator overloading of any notation I have ever come across. letters like "C" can refer to a shape, a chord, a tone, a note, a scale...depending on context.
• Music notation is a set of off-by-one-errors/fences'n'gatepost errors waiting to happen. If ever an interval counting system could benefit from 0 based addressing, this is it! Instead we have "thirds". Hmmm. Now do you mean the item at offset 2 or are you counting from 1 and do you really mean the fourth item? Even if you get this sorted you have to deal with the fact that "thirds" might mean "major thirds" which, unlike "minor thirds" are actually probably "fourths" - or something - depending on how you count. On top of that, the entire naming system repeats in cycles up and down the octaves which makes it a *perfect* for modulus based arithmetic but no, that would be too easy...
  
• There is a whole lot of mutually incompatible information out there about music in general and guitar seems to have a lion's share of it. Some examples:
  
  
  
  • chord diagrams that show D Major with 5 played strings and others with 4. (I now know why this can occur but it confused me greatly for a while).
    
  • Books/Web Pages that announce "There are two basic barre chord forms A and B."
    
  • Books/Web Pages that say "C Major is this 5 string shape" while others say "C Major is this 6 string shape". (I figured this one out too eventually.)
    
  • Videos that talk about hitting four strings only for D Major and then show you how to do it *but* actually play all SIX strings, using a thumb on the sixth string. (I figured this out too eventually).
    

Some non-gripes

• The language of music is all the more intriguing for its
  weirdness. Just like so many other long established semiotic
  systems. Much of the weirdness is I think, traceable back to the naming convention for the C Major Scale with its straight A to G and its nice simple gaps of two semi-tones...except for the EF and BC pairs. Its as if version 0.01 of the naming convention just stuck and was never re-factored even though the app is now at version 20.0.
  
• Finally, of all the video-based tutorial stuff I've been playing with and the DVD's I've bought, I find Mike Herberts
  no-nonsense, watch-n-learn stuff very, very useful to have
  side-by-side with the more theory-oriented stuff. The two-camera setup he uses is extremely helpful in figuring out what is going on.
  

Newbie Geek Strums #3

Further on the Newbie geek strums theme...

RSI

• My fingers/wrists are my livelyhood. Without a computer keyboard I would rapidly both economically challenged and - quite possibly - psychotic. Thus, any pain in the wrist/fingers is a source of concern. Most guitar tutorial resources (paper/electronic) start out saying something like "your fingers will hurt for a while but you will get used to it" and/or "Suffer through the pain ye who aspire to scale the pentatonic heights!" Worrying.
  
• I have had pain in my right wrist/fingers before. Generally it flares up if, say, I write code for 40 hours p.w. and then throw another 20 on top of that writing a book or something. I haven't had it for a few years but then again, I haven't written any book for a few years...A week into my guitar adventure it came back. My first reaction - ditch the guitar. Second reaction: maybe it will pass. Third reaction (after about 3 weeks): lets switch to using a left hand
  mouse. Fourth reaction (after about 6 weeks): maybe this is going to work out after all.
  
• Although I am a Ciotóg I have always used a mouse with my right hand. I got used to using my left hand for mousing in a couple of hours. The RSI-like pains are now much, much less frequent. So far so good.

F chords

• An obvious thing for a beginner to do is to seek out simple songs to get started with chords. It has been a revelation that "simple" in guitar-land does not correlate with "simple" as I had envisioned it. For example, two simple chords and some simple strumming patterns make Horse with no name a lot easier than it sounds to a total newbie. It sounded complicated to my newbie ears. Certainly much more complicated than a bunch of nursery rhymes such as Hickory Dickory Dock or London bridge is falling down (see here for example.)
  Not so! A lot of nursery rhymes feature fearsome goblins and gargoyles in the form of F and B chords. Shudder. The first fingering diagram I saw for an F chord involved a barre chord on fret 1. This fearsome construct appeared to me to require (a) breaking and then resetting all my fingers in different positions (b) making judicous use of some sandlewood strips and a monkey wrench (c) taking 20 minutes between chord changes. Today, I'm still worried about ever being able to do barre chords but I have got over the shock of finding that "simple" is not easily defined in guitar land. On the positive side, I can hobble through some stuff that to my newbie brain sounds complex musically but isn't technically.

A multi-pass compiler approach to grokking music

• I have yet to find a single tutorial text that truly teaches the subject from the ground up without annoying - and sometimes infuriating - forward references or logical leaps.
  
• I have lost count of the number of resources I have read that spend ages telling you about, say, how to hold your guitar and then make a gargantuan jump like "Now that you know how to hold the guitar, lets use an alternating base arpeggio to play this C Major Pentatonic Scale"...or some such. Ok, I'm exageratting a bit but not much.
  
• Perhaps music is one great big Hermeneutic circle. Even if it isn't, I suspect western notation is. Is it possible to start with, say the basic physics of harmonic series and arrive at, say mixolydian mode without making forward references to something the learner doesn't know yet? I dunno. If such a text exists, I have not found it yet.
  
• My approach has been to read music-related stuff the way I would mentally compile programming language source code. I make a mental note of all the forward references to symbols I don't know yet. I then make a second pass through the "text" resolving the now known symbols in their proper context.
  
• If it is a Hermeneutic circle, it would be great to know that in advance. Someone with the know-how could map out the circular bits. That would be very useful. Years ago while writing SGML For Software Developers I concluded that the concepts in SGML were unavoidable circular. I meant to try to map the circles at the time but never got around to in.
  

Tabla

• Being something of a masochist when it comes to complexity, I have decided to try my hand at Tabla at the same time as I struggle with the guitar. My reasoning goes like this:
  
  
  • What better way to understand what it means to say that the "12 notes with 2212221 intervals is a Western phenomenon not a universal truth" than to understand a completely different musical tradition?
    
  • Tabla has its own language - its own notation. As a software developer, I'm fascinated by notations. Period. Bring it on.
    
  • If RSI ends up killing my guitar plans, I have a plan B
    
  • The merest sound of a tabla induce a Pavlovian response in me which is very pleasant, especially before dinner.