I’ve been playing for I guess close to a year now. I’ve played around at guitar for many years never really applying myself. Took piano lessons as a kid and was already versed in basic theory. I’m an independent contractor and the market has taken a plunge here in the last 6 months so I’ve been dedicated to practicing while I have the chance. I daily spend over 4 hours playing, and often the entire day, I WANT it, and, more, I LOVE it. I just go on the Chordie website, (or similar sites), browsing and trying out songs, saving the pages, and making corrections and formatting in a printable layout so I can put them in my book. That way if I want to go to the park or beach or something, I don’t have to bring my laptop. At first when browsing songs I would find a riff or something I could play and move on to find easier songs, page copying to my documents as I went, (with all the legal action being taken by the Music Publishing Assoc. one by one the tab site are disappearing) so that I already have a pretty large database that I upload to a virtual storage site and burn to disk so that I’m backed up.

I am getting more and more fluent with chords. What helps me with the strumming patterns and timing is to put the music on my I-pod when I work and just LISTEN over and over. I had the same music on track for work every day for 5 months when I was getting started, simple, slow, 4 chord country tunes and Dylan and I would come home and try until I got it, learning chords along the way. I learned to read “real” music, (staffs and all) when I was a kid and I want to be a sight reader of all guitar music: tablature, sheet, and chords. I picked chords first because I just want to play. I kind of have a plan: Chords, scales, Fret board. At this point I can pretty much look at the chord notation of a song I know, and finger pick it while mouthing the words, then find the most optimal,(or least difficult) chord locations, then move to a pick. The pick is kind of new with me, but a couple of weeks ago I made kind of a breakthrough with it, sort of combining finger picking with strumming.

The resources available on the web are endless. There is no excuse with all that is out there not to learn if the desire and self discipline are there. There are even resources for developing the desire and self discipline, 43 things and Zen guitar for example are two of my motivators. Also I just turned 39 and I have dedicated myself many times to learning so many things that were supposed to help me get around to the things I actually wanted to do and all they did was take me farther from them. Playing guitar, pushing to see where I can take it, costs very little but time; time, as Crosby Still and Nash said: “we have wasted on the way.” Hmm… I think I’ll pull up some of their music and see what I can do. Later!