Hi friends! I hope you enjoyed reading my first update last week on my attempts to re-learn guitar. This week I was able to practice 3 or 4 times, and I am actually starting to see some improvement! I have focused on getting better at variations of G, C, D, E, and A, which to me are the easiest chords. I’m a little intimidated to try to learn F and B, since they are barre chords and use my whole pointer finger. But maybe next week!

When I started a week ago, the strings buzzed and my transitions were pretty slow. But after practicing transitions over and over, I think I’m slowly getting better at it! I usually spend about 10 minutes on chords and another 10 minutes playing actual songs so I can practice strumming as well. My lessons in high school are starting to come back to me a bit. AND I’m finally starting to get calluses! Which normally would be annoying but once they are built up my fingers will start hurting less, so I’m excited.

One of my favorite resources for finding song chords is www.ultimate-guitar.com. I have used this website for basically every song I look up, and they usually have a few different versions that people vote on to see which is the best. It also allows you to easily transpose the key (which I use a lot to avoid those annoying Fs). I used it to try to play some of the new One Republic songs, but Ryan Tedder just sings in crazy keys and I couldn’t figure it out!

Anyway, I was feeling pretty proud of my progress so far when from our living room, Matt calls out a song request – Peaceful Easy Feeling by the Eagles. At first, when I looked it up, I thought yes, I can do this. But I quickly realized that A) I don’t really know the song well enough to play it and B) the chords sounded all weird when I transposed it so it just didn’t gel. Maybe that will be a goal of mine for next time. Anyways, hopefully by next week my calluses will be in full swing and I will be able to practice for longer amounts of time! See you next Tuesday!