Acoustic Guitar: Hammer-Ons and Pull-Offs with Chords and Final Post

Hammer-ons and pull-offs are one way to make playing chords sound different and abstract. A hammer-on is "when you push (or "hammer") a left-hand finer onto a string with enough force to sound to note without using your picking hand." A pull-off  is "when you release a left-hand finger onto a string with a slight downward motion-actually plucking the string with the tip of your left-hand finger; again, sounding the note without using your picking hand. At first, I was a little confused as to how I would do that, but then I listened to the CD that the book provided and it gave me a sense of what both a hammer-on and a pull-off should sound like. It also felt a little awkward to try and "hammer" and "pull" on the chords. It still is and it's still a little confusing. This is one of the more difficult things I needed to learn while playing guitar. Trying to add on extra sounds and accents while playing might take me longer to get the hang of, especially since I'm still working on perfecting playing the basic chords. I practiced this for a couple of days and it is still a little difficult. Ok, very difficult. The sound of the guitar when I play sounds completely off and not how the CD sounds. To be honest, it can get a little frustrating when what I play on my guitar doesn't sound like its supposed to sound. Although, I do have to remind myself that it takes time and the that the longer and more frequent I practice, the more I will gradually get better.

Diagram of a hammer-on

Diagram of a pull-off

Over all, this has been a pretty cool project. This gave me the opportunity to improve my guitar skills, which something I've been wanting to do for a while. As I said in my previous posts, I did not become a pro by the end of this project, but I did indeed learn a couple new things and improved my skills. Sometimes it was hard for me to play, because it felt like I wasn't really getting anywhere, but u reminded myself that results don't show up over night. I will definitely continue to practice guitar after this project and I will hopefully become at least a fairly good guitar player in the future.

   

Learning Acoustic Guitar: Learning Songs

Since all of the chord learning is mostly in order, now its time to learn a song or two. This past month I have been learning the chords to a song called Fine by a Korean artist named Taeyeon. I began to learn this song around Summer time, but only a small portion of it, then stopped once school started again. The chords consist of G Em C, Dm Am, and. There is also an element of the song called palm muting, where you semi mute the resonation of the guitars sound with your palm, but I decided to leave that part out and just focus on the learning the chords and strums. It took a while and is still taking me time to remember the sequence of the chords or what not and also making sure the chords are played clean. Although, guitar does take time to learn and I definitely won't sound like a pro by the end of this project. When I first learned this song, the transition between chords were very choppy and the strums were sloppy. For me to be able to become better, I would need to just practice. I really already have all of the foundation down, so I really just need to practice and perfect my technique and things like that. I practiced playing the first verse and then the chorus parts of the song and as I listened to myself play, my strums are still a little messy at some points and as well as my chords. It can take a while for someone to get used to the finger spacing especially when it comes to certain chords. For certain chords when you strum, you might need to leave out certain strings to play that specific chords and that is another thing I need to work on. Over all, the strums and the chords sound a lot smoother compared to when I first learned the song. Now I just need to practice practice practice.

Picture of me playing "Fine" by Taeyeon..

Learning Acoustic Guitar

By Yna Costales

Open Position Chords

Okay! So, I decided to get into learning acoustic guitar a lot more for my IRP. Some background about guitar playing for me is that I got my first guitar when I was twelve and have played it on and off since then. Although, I have never really tried to learn it in great detail, so with this I hope to learn it a lot more and further my abilities in playing guitar.
This month I practiced the six basic open position chords. According to the my book Acoustic Guitar Complete "These are the most fundamental chords to all styles to guitar playing."
The open position chords includes:

• The E major chord
  


• The A major chord
  


• The D major chord
  


• G major
  


• C major
  


• B7 chord
  

This is a Picture of me practicing the G major chord.

This is another angle of the G major chord. In order to play the chord cleanly you must play on your fingertips, holing your finger perpendicularly to the neck. It is also important to keep your fingers from interfering with strings that they are not playing.

Relearning these chords was a little tricky for me. It's important to press down all the way when playing chords. Otherwise, when you strum, the chord won't sound clean (I had a lot of trouble with this). It's also important to know when you're first starting out or coming from little experience when playing the guitar that you will most likely sound pretty bad, but with patience and persistence you will gradually get better.