Session 4, Week 3 Recap

I'm slow to post an update here because I'm still recovering from Square Roots Fest!
I hope some of you got a chance to check it out. What a great weekend of music, dancing, community...and beer. So much beer.

Somehow we managed to still have classes! So here's the rundown.

In Guitar 1, we locked in the A and E chords, and added quite a few new ones to the rotation. First up was E minor, which--like all minor chords--has a mournful sound. You make that one by starting from a regular E shape and simply lifting up your index finger. E7 is just as simple--you lift up your ring finger instead of your index finger. E-asy peasy (see what I did there?). Practice your E to E minor and your E to E7! Those exercises will get your fingers in shape.

We also talked some more about eighth note strumming (down-up down-up down-up; also known as one-and two-and three-and four-and); and we worked our way through some old tunes (Leaving on a Jet Plane), and some new--to us anyway!--ones, most notably I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. That tune introduced the concept of "split measures," which mean that you play more than one chord in a single span of 4 counts, two beat for each chord listed.

If that wasn't enough new stuff to worry about, we also plunged into the G chord. For now, play it with your 1, 2, and 3 fingers, but we'll talk about different options next week. We looked at just the chorus of Sunshine, and we'll start with that tune next week and see if we can put the whole thing together.

My Guitar 2 classes have forked slightly due to the night off on Independence Day, but both sessions this week worked with capos. We know how to properly put them on the guitars, what they do, and how to read "Yo Mama's Capo and Transposing" chart in the course pack. Experiment! Take a song you love to play, and mess around with adding the capo. How does changing the key effect your ability to sing the tune? Harder? Easier? Look at the chart and see if you can figure out what key you've switched to by adding a capo. Start to get comfortable with the different keys so you know which ones you like and which ones you don't. Also, play Careless Love from the songbook in the key of C (inside the parenthesis), and then play it again using the shapes listed outside the parenthesis (which would normally be the key of A), but with the capo at the 3rd fret. Same song, same key, two different chord constructions! Neato!

Sunday's group got a little further with the addition of D minor to the chord vocabulary, which we solidified by playing the tune from the vid up there, with some fun two-part vocals and percussion. A graduation contender perhaps? Too soon to tell...

See you all soon, and as always, e-mail me with any questions or problems you may be having as you PRACTICE!