Hope you're all enjoying this sudden return of summer! I for one am ready for flannel and cute boots, but maybe that's just me.
Here's a rundown of our classes last week, for your reference.
In Guitar 1 Rep on Saturday morning, we broke out a trusty Wilco tune to get back to guitar after the summer (or even longer!) break. California Stars has a great, simple chord structure that just repeats and repeats and repeats, so you can stop thinking about your left hand altogether. It goes AAEEDDAA. That's it! After a few times through, your fretting hand should start to know what to do automatically and you can focus on strumming instead. For that, we talked about "The Golden Strum," aka the Tequila Sunrise strum, aka the folk strum. It'll become an old friend soon enough!
We broke it down into a couple of steps. For starters, we down-strummed just once on beat one (a quarter note), and then down-up down-up down-up (eighth notes) on beats 2 & 3 & 4. You can stay at that stage if that's where you're comfortable, but when you're ready, try dropping the downstrum on beat three. You'll still play the upstrum on the "and" of three. It feels pretty funny at first to skip a main beat like that, but the secret it to keep your hand moving as if you were still strumming, just don't make contact with the strings. Written with arrows, it looks like this:
V V^ ^ V^
You could also think of it like this:
D DU U DU
Here's Bob Seger doing a nice little cover of the tune at a recent concert. He's using different chord shapes than we are because he's got a little device called a capo on the neck of his guitar. We'll talk more about that later.
(it won't let me embed this one for some reason, but click here for the goods:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOUbxsRlkO8
Next week we'll start some reggae strumming and look at a couple of songbook tunes to revisit some of the lesser-used chords you touched on in Guitar 1. Practice well!
In Guitar 2 Rep on Thursday night AND on Sunday afternoon, we got back into shape with Yellow Submarine, as requested by Tom. It's a simple tune in terms of chords, but it has a deceptive rhythmic pattern. In the split measures, be sure to give the first chord 3 beats, and only one beat to the second chord. When you start to swing it a little, that last beat will start to feel like a pick-up note that leads into the next measure. (Less like "four, one" and more like "and one") That's the right feel, but just be careful not to get lost on the chart!
Here's the trailer for the Yellow Submarine film. (you can find the whole thing on YouTube but it's a Russian bootleg so I'll let you decide whether or not to go for it)
This movie was kind of traumatic for me when I was a kid. But seeing the lads being cute in the flesh at the end heals a lot of wounds!
Here's a rundown of our classes last week, for your reference.
In Guitar 1 Rep on Saturday morning, we broke out a trusty Wilco tune to get back to guitar after the summer (or even longer!) break. California Stars has a great, simple chord structure that just repeats and repeats and repeats, so you can stop thinking about your left hand altogether. It goes AAEEDDAA. That's it! After a few times through, your fretting hand should start to know what to do automatically and you can focus on strumming instead. For that, we talked about "The Golden Strum," aka the Tequila Sunrise strum, aka the folk strum. It'll become an old friend soon enough!
We broke it down into a couple of steps. For starters, we down-strummed just once on beat one (a quarter note), and then down-up down-up down-up (eighth notes) on beats 2 & 3 & 4. You can stay at that stage if that's where you're comfortable, but when you're ready, try dropping the downstrum on beat three. You'll still play the upstrum on the "and" of three. It feels pretty funny at first to skip a main beat like that, but the secret it to keep your hand moving as if you were still strumming, just don't make contact with the strings. Written with arrows, it looks like this:
V V^ ^ V^
You could also think of it like this:
D DU U DU
Here's Bob Seger doing a nice little cover of the tune at a recent concert. He's using different chord shapes than we are because he's got a little device called a capo on the neck of his guitar. We'll talk more about that later.
(it won't let me embed this one for some reason, but click here for the goods:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOUbxsRlkO8
Next week we'll start some reggae strumming and look at a couple of songbook tunes to revisit some of the lesser-used chords you touched on in Guitar 1. Practice well!
In Guitar 2 Rep on Thursday night AND on Sunday afternoon, we got back into shape with Yellow Submarine, as requested by Tom. It's a simple tune in terms of chords, but it has a deceptive rhythmic pattern. In the split measures, be sure to give the first chord 3 beats, and only one beat to the second chord. When you start to swing it a little, that last beat will start to feel like a pick-up note that leads into the next measure. (Less like "four, one" and more like "and one") That's the right feel, but just be careful not to get lost on the chart!
Here's the trailer for the Yellow Submarine film. (you can find the whole thing on YouTube but it's a Russian bootleg so I'll let you decide whether or not to go for it)
This movie was kind of traumatic for me when I was a kid. But seeing the lads being cute in the flesh at the end heals a lot of wounds!
We also dabbled gently in Crazy Little Thing Called Love, which Ryan from Thursday requested, in honor of what would've been Freddie Mercury's 67th birthday. As I mentioned, that's going to be sort of a project song. There's a lot of little things to learn so I think we'll just take it a chunk at a time over several weeks. Last week it was the movement from D to Dsus4 through the cunning use of the pinky finger. Keep it simple, don't over think it, and focus on getting your right hand to behave. The first-stage strumming pattern is down-up down-up (rest on 3 & 4 and swing it just a little bit). You throw your pinky in on the second downstrum, which falls on the 2nd beat, and then you take it right back off again for the upstrum on the and. Don't worry about the extra chuck-a-chuck-as you'll hear in the Queen version on the 3rd and 4th beats. We'll get to those later.
Here's Freddie and the gang making their live US television debut on Saturday Night Live in 1982. Freddie is playing a 12 string guitar, but the chord shapes should look pretty familiar to you nonetheless! His voice was all strained, allegedly from having fought with their manager rather loudly the night before. He's still twice the rock star that anyone else is!
Remember to e-mail me questions/comments/concerns/requests/awesomestuff anytime! jane(dot)hanna(at)gmail(dot)com is the best way to get me.
No comments:
Post a Comment