No more taped fingers

Oh yea forgot to mention, my cousin adviced me against finger taping, so since the third day its been bare fingers...ok so it was a good way to survive the second day but he was right, it wasnt too prudent an idea...

He gave me an exercise to practice, i must say it was the most effective exercise yet. It is to place your fingers on the very end of the guitar.

step 1 pluck the sixth string bare

step 2 pluck it again but this time with the first finger on the first fret

step 3 pluck it again but this time with the second finger on the second fret, without letting go of the first fingers position

step 4 do the same for third and fourth finger while holding all the fingers in place. Its actually pretty hard at first, but once u get the right hand position its actually rather easy.

step 5 repeat the above said for the 5th string and so on

step 6 one uve reached the first string and ur pinky is on fourth fret, let the pinky go and play, then let the third finger go and pluck again, basicly the reverse of wht uve been doing before

step 7 repeat this same thing for the second string, by placing ur fingers in position and letting go of finger by finger

Now the trick is to make a proper sound with each pluck, so its important to apply enuf pressure each time, and ur cheatin if u loosen ur grip on any of the fingers while playing.

As u get better u can do this exercise faster and faster with more accuracy. After this exercise hitting chords will be pretty much childs play, as this four finger exercise makes u stretch ur fingers apart more than any chord with the exception of barre chords, i have seen em, but its hard to explain it, go wiki :P

NOTE: while pressin the fingers on the chords avoid touching the adjacent strings, pluck the other strings while in position and make sure they make the same sound otherwise u will need to adjust the position of ur fingers. Making sure ur fingers dont touch the adjacent strings during this exercise will greatly improve chord hitting accuracy.

Another thing to keep in mind is the pluckin technique, the thinner strings need to be plucked differently to make an actual sound. see that youtube vid and its links for guitar basics, im just covering the stuff they forgot to mention :P

Neways thats the stuff i shud have written before Krauser Vs Shoichi post, now back to practice

Krauser Vs Shoichi

Its been six days since i got ma guitar, i must say, the pains are almost gone, now im working on hitting the chords right and on time. ive been practicing to play ode to joy in this video from youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsmxhYK-SF8&feature=related

Thats all well and good, i guess im improving faster than i thought, but something is really really bothering me now.

I hate the fact that im supposed to play an acoustic first, it sucks, and now its come to the point where id like to call it the Krauser vs Shoichi internal war.Read it up on wikipedia wont u, its hard to explain

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metal_City

But in my case im krauser and now forced to play some acoustic instead. It bugs me so much im usually playing the album blooddrunk while practicing, atleast then i wont fall asleep, and not to mention the songs knda stimulate me so i can keep on going....this is almost torture....just wait...when i get my hands on my electric, this acoustic might as well end up trashed like Krauser's first one :P.

Heres hoping that happens soon, its either that or death by bodom...i mean boredom :P. Okai ima pen off from here, back to practice.

My first Acoustic :D

Yesterday, i got my first guitar, and acoustic from a nameless japan brand...plays like a beauty and still just as hard on my poor fingers....well the pain is actually getting less now.

This wud be the first time since september that id be holding a guitar even. Due to the Gamefest and some other stuffs i kinda got distracted from the guitar thing, but me saved up some dough this month and bam! Now i can start practicing in peace.

The shopping trip itself was kinda interesting actually, me and my friend (hes an expert on guitars so brought him along as a shopping guide and well its boring to shop alone too) went to like three shops. And in my knowledege the only three in male. Amazing isnt it? Though the equipment they had were pretty good actually, and im talking about electric guitars here. Island Music for instance had a Rhoads shaped guitar, like the one alexi laiho from children of bodom uses. I cud tell it was worth its price since it had two EMG pickups and what looks to be a legit floyd rose tremolo. Ok so that was a lil guitar technical stuff i mentioned but ill try to explain these components in detail in later posts. Google them if curiousity gets the best of you, ud be amazed how the electric guitar actually works. They were asking 5000 for it, and they were forced to cut the price from 7000 this month, I feel a little pity for them really, that guitar looks way more than 7000 even, and no one wants to buy it. Or could anyhow...

That being said Island Music did look like they had the better set of instruments and other related equipment like amps, but they had the biggest prices too, and for me, i hate acoustics, i just want to learn what i can from it and then smash it all over the place as soon as i get my electric, so i went for a relatively cheap one. Though its pretty good to get me to sleep, i swear i fell asleep after less than an hour of playing...well thats a good thing in a sense, but it just shows how boring it is for myself.

Twas some nameless brand, about the same size as an electric and cost about 790. Not bad i guess, it sounded great, and even after a whole day of skill-less strutting and sister and bro tampering it remained in tune, so its pretty solid.

Aside all this im still having trouble holding the chords, so i kinda taped the tips of my four fingers...and it actually works :D, hurts a lot less and its easier to press down on the strings too, i guess a week of just holding chords in place i cud finally play a decent song...but it seems a new level from where i am at the moment.

Well thats it for now, maybe it might be another month before another post, or maybe id write one this afternoon, id laugh a little right now and just say, yea it just depends on my mood.

First Time

A week back I got my first unofficial guitar lesson. Put it in other terms a good friend of mine invited me over and he taught me the basics of the guitar. As much as I hated the idea, I had to start from acoustic. Its not what I wanted to play, Im a metal fan and if I had a choice Id never touch a hollow guitar.

Though that was my initial mindset. He showed me the standard tuning for a guitar. The EADGBE. Now, that may seem like some weird letter to most of us yea? Allow me to explain.

Now most of you may have noticed that the different strings on the guitar are of different thickness? What? You never noticed? Well, they are :P. And they are not simply just thick and thicker, the bass strings (the upper three strings on any guitar, ) are thicker cos they are coiled with another string.

Now, you may think the tuning is reffered to the thickness of string. Wrong. The tuning is apparently a frequency at which the string vibrates in, my friend had this pretty nifty device that detects this frequency, and on other information my voice seems to be mostly on B tuning haha. (it detects fequency of everything so better to tune in a quiet place)

Tunings aside there were some other things he showed me like finger techniques as Id like to call them.

Tech stuff aside he played this song from creed on the acoustic. Honestly that was the first time I saw an acoustic played in front of me that involved any skill. It was very impressive. Lets just say after that I didnt mind practicing on the acoustic, its a great instrument, and if your a true music fan you can appreaciate what it can do.

The first time I tried pressing on the strings to get a chord, I pressed way too lightly, apparently have to press the string all the way to the fret board below to get the desired tone.

It may sound silly, but it was pretty hard pressing that hard, even with one finger. Had to cut my finger nails cos they were getting in the way too. (they are pretty short mind you, but it needed to be cut further than that >.<). Then we tried a simple tone sequence, he did it almost effortlessly. For me, the times I didnt get the timing wrong I was not able to press the strings hard enough. And the annoying bit was the frets nearer to the body are even harder to press. On top of that you had to strut a little harder to make the string vibrate too. Needless to say, nothing sounding harmonic or nice ever came out of me playing that day.

By the end of the day, my fingers were sore, my forearm was sore from all the pressure and even my shoulder hurt a little cos I was supposed to relax it while playing.

But before that, I got to play around with an electric guitar. It was a Greg Bennet Interceptor (Fasy ge guitar shape). It was a pretty high end one and I always thought electrics could never make the same harmonic and natural tones like an acoustic. A big no there too, the electric did a damn good job.

But its true awesomeness was when the distortion on the amp was on. Truly metal thats for sure.

The electric's strings were a lot easier to press, maybe cos the string material was different. It felt a lot more comfortable though heavier. And I managed to pull off one bit from the power rangers theme song's finger tapping solo XD. The electric really does a lot of the work for the player.

On the downside though the electric is pretty much way more awesome than the acoustic, its still not so feasible cos it was so expensive. And the cheap ones sound like....well....very very bad. So the first guitar Im gonna get would be an acoustic. And when I get the hang of that like my friend said, the electric is gonna be easy in relativity so the price wont be an issue.

So there you have it, my first time playing, it was utterly horrible from my side but it was enjoyable and i guess one has to start somewhere.

Intro

Welcome Readers,

Hmm, its hard to find a start to say this, lets just say, Its been a long time dream of mine to play the guitar. Not just play the guitar, nor to play some classical stuff on an acoustic or just to make some incoherent noises on an electric either. Nope, Im aiming to master the guitar to a level that would allow me to play anything Id want.

Dont get me wrong. Im not aiming to be a musician or a band member. This is just for fun but its no fun if I cant do the riff on children of bodom :P

At the time of writing this post, my skill level in this instrument is that I dont know how to properly hold the guitar.......oh well, long road, lets begin the walk.