One more baby step and a few conspiracy theories

     Hello! If this is the first time you been here to my little corner of the world wide web, welcome! If you've been here before, well, welcome back and thanks for sticking with me.


     To any newcomers (just in case, because I'm looking forward to meeting lots of people at the 20Time project fair tomorrow!), my name is Sarah, and I'm attempting to learn to play the guitar. I started almost two months ago, and I'm currently making very steady baby steps toward my goal of being able to play a song or two by the end of this thing.


     This week, I continued to decode my way through "House of the Rising Sun". It's making a little more sense, especially after I figured out what the heck the second line of music was doing down there.
Here's one of the lines I had in my last blog.



The first line was self explanatory. It's got like notes and stuff (that's definitely the technical term).  The second line got me scratching my head a little.


Theories I had about that puzzling second line:

1)  This is actually where half of the music is written, printed with invisible ink that you can only read when you are wearing cool, musician-y, Blues Brothers sunglasses.

 

2)  There's some poor guy trapped in a sheet music factory and he left a secret message in the second line, in hopes that a musician would find it while playing "House of the Rising Sun" and come to his rescue.

3)  The second line does not exist and I am hallucinating because I did not drink any coffee today.

4)  You see how the numbers form a pyramid on each measure? Illuminati. ( Because what kind of conspiracy theory list doesn't include those guys? Not a list I want to read, that's for sure).

 

 

5)  This is some sort of message from extraterrestrial life forms. I'm not saying aliens wrote the second line, but aliens wrote the second line.

6)  That guess I had last post about the fingers on the frets.


     Yeah, turns out I was right the first time. I'm pretty sure it just tells you which string to strum to make the note if the normal string's sound will be altered by the strings and frets you have your fingers of your other hand on. The line the number is on tells you which string, and the number tells you which fret, if any, you need to have your finger on.

     Not the most dramatic of my theories, but I am really glad I figured this out. It was kind of a break-through moment and a confidence booster. This is going to make things go a little smoother, so I can keep on improving and maybe take a bigger step than just a baby one?

Bye for now!

- Sarah

 

P.S. If you direct your attention to the right hand side of the screen, you can see a gadget I just added on that shows a picture of a cute puppy everyday! I mean, it doesn't really have anything to do with music or guitars, but it's adorable, so I put it there. Because why not. So, please, enjoy the daily adorableness!

 

Sources for images: http://thebluesmobile.com/tag/blues-brothers/ and https://vesselanaw.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/one-dollar-pyramidcrop.jpg

Fun with charts and the mysterious second line

     Okay guys, I have a confession This week, I cheated on Keith and his carefully planned DVD lessons. Instead of using a DVD this week, I learned a song from that website I mentioned earlier, guitarnoise.com.

     Well, I started learning a song. I'm not done with it yet, and I'm certainly not ready to really perform anything, but I can recognize the tune from what I've figured out so far, so I'm happy with it.

     It's "House of the Rising Sun", which, according to Wikipedia, started as a folk song and was most successfully recorded by The Animals in 1964. Although it is included in Keith's lessons, this song doesn't come until the 25th lesson, and I really wanted to play some blues music and I just got kind of impatient.

     Also, I wanted some practice with reading actual music. Keith's method so far is great, which consists of him telling us and showing us how the song is played by demonstrating, but I would really like to be able to pick up sheet music and be able to figure out what all the notes mean.

     The lesson I found online started out with introducing the chords that would be needed. (I was super excited when I found out I already knew one.)


     Then it explained how finger picking works, which just means you use your finger tips instead of a guitar pick for the stings, except my nails were too long and it just ended up sounding like I had five guitar picks on the ends of my fingers.

     After cutting my nails, I started to unravel the arpeggios. They're notes played in a descending or ascending succession. They're kind of like chords that have been taken apart, so you play each string individually while holding down the chord on the frets.

Here's the first arpeggio:


     The letters in the middle indicate which finger to use to strum that note. Then I used this chart to help me figure out which strings corresponded to the notes.


     It's a cool looking chart. It seemed a little daunting at first, but I think I've figured it out...pretty much. The only thing is, I'm still not super clear on what the second line is, with the T, A, and B and the numbers. Does that have something to do with where your fingers are holding down the chord on the frets? If anybody reading this happens to have a clue about this mysterious second line, I would love to hear more about it in comments! If not, I'll do a little bit more research and figure it out eventually!

Until the next post,
-Sarah

Oh, and I got the images from http://www.dontfret.com/how_to_use_it.html and http://www.guitarnoise.com/lessons/house-of-the-rising-sun/

If you want to check out the online lesson I used, follow this link http://www.guitarnoise.com/lessons/house-of-the-rising-sun/