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..

Acoustic Guitar: The Capo

The first thing I learned and reviewed when I started playing acoustic guitar was open position chords. A recap of that is that those chords involve open strings. With capo you can change chord fingering more easily and work in almost any key. The capo is very handy especially when accompanying a singer or myself. As someone who loves music including playing guitar and singing, this is very handy. My book provided me an example to practice involving the G chord with E fingering, C chord with A fingering, F chord with D fingering, B minor with G fingering, E minor with C fingering, and D7 with B7 fingering. I practiced the chords until I committed them to memory as my book instructed me. The F chord and the B minor chord were the easiest for me to get the hang of, while the chord that was I little more challenging was the E minor chord with the finger spacing. This does make it easier to make the key of a song higher if needed. My chord playing is still a little sloppy, but as I keep practicing it gets little by little it sounds less bad.

This is a picture of me playing a B minor chord with G fingering.

This is a picture of me playing an E minor chord with C fingering.

I have also tried to practice capo while singing and I do have to say that it is a kind of difficult. I haven't really played the guitar while singing very much. It will take some time to get used to it, but I am determined to do so.

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Acoustic Guitar: How to Read Music

Another step needed to take to learn how to play the guitar is to learn how to read music. You will need to learn how to play sheet music with time signatures, notes/scales, and also strum patterns. Reading sheet music and notes isn't new to me. Though I did take some time to review and remember notes, since it has been a while since I've done so. This was a fairly simple process for me. Once again, this is more of just reviewing, remembering, and improving for me. One thing I did learn is how to read strum patterns on sheet music (shown in the picture alone). Figuring out what I need to do is pretty simple. The main thing that is needed for me to improve is to just practice and get the information I learned programed into my brain. Guitar is a very difficult instrument to learn, but with patience and persistence my skills will gradually grow and get better.

Strumming consists of up strokes and down stokes.

My book had me practice different strumming patterns while switching between different chords. One strum pattern that was given was a constant down up motion, always playing the strings in the down strokes and only playing the strings every other up stroke.

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.

 

Guitar for Dummies: Effects, Pedals and Other Devices

I've been playing guitar since I was in the sixth grade. Every now and then I feel this sense of boredom with the same old sound. That's why I went from acoustic to electric, but after a while that got boring too. That's when I discovered pedals. Pedals are a means to change the sound of the guitar, whether it be to add more distortion or cause weird effects. It creates a more fresh sound and adds more to the table for a guitar player like me. Using them is simple. You set up the two tone knobs for some and plug it into your amp and guitar. Step on it while you are playing and there you go! The effects should begin and you can add this new tone to your arsenal of playing.

In this video, I'm using a wah wah pedal. According to the text, on page 287 in the section "Investigating Individual effects" it states, "This effects pedal is a type of frequency filter that imbues the guitar with expressive, voice like characteristics" (Chappell 287). You can hear this in the video, because a guitar doesn't naturally sound how it did, with how the notes waver from one side to the other like a teeter totter.  Playing this simple note progression wouldn't be as interesting if it wasn't for the wah-wah pedal

In the picture you can see how my foot is placed on the pedal. The book says to control the sound, you just raise and lower your foot on the foot pedal (Chappell 287). You do it to rhythm of your desire in order to create the sound you desire. I had a steady beat in the video because I wanted it to go over my choppy style of playing the intro song. 

Using a wah wah pedal has showed me how much further I can take my range of playing by using even more pedals. Without using a pedal, I am stuck in a more closed realm of playing guitar but now I have learned in the book that there are even more types of pedals that can change my style of playing. I hope to learn how to use these pedals so I can take my guitar playing to another level.

The song I played in the video was Voodoo Child by Jimi Hendrix, one of my favorite songs. With this said, what is your favorite song and why? 

Phillips, Mark, and Jon Chappell. Guitar for Dummies. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Pub., 2006. Print.

Guitar for Dummies: Blues lead guitar

When you play music, there's a certain structure you have to follow. You have to play certain chords, do a certain pattern, play at a certain speed, etc. While it takes skill to learn how to follow complicated songs, it takes an even stronger skill to be able and make a song your own. That's the beautiful thing about blues. On page 189 in the section "Blues lead guitar", it states "Blues leads is the single note melodic line, consisting of a mixture of composed lines and improvised phrases" (Chappell 189). Some songs are certainly easy to play, consisting of just three chords repeatedly and that's all it requires to play. However, any guitar player should have the strength to make a song their own by improvising. Improvising doesn't meaning to start playing random notes and hoping that it sounds nice, but rather following a scale for the key of the strong.

"Don't Let Me Down" by The Beatles

As you can see, I'm playing the same chords followed by the same lick. This is how it goes throughout the whole four minute song, however by improvising I can make the guitar line of the song sound more fresh. To do this, I will have to play within the "boxes" of the pentatonic scale as the book says (Chappell 189). A box is certain notes I can play along the neck of the guitar from a certain position that all are in the same scale, which causes them to compliment each other when played together. Whichever chord I'm playing, I would have to position my hand to the root of the chord and start playing these notes. For example, in the song I'm playing, I play a B chord so I have to play the scale with the root at the B string. 

With this video, you can notice much more variation and it creates a more lively sense to the song compared to the first video. That's because those little additional notes I'm playing are all within the box, which is the picture you see above. This has impacted me because by learning how this works, I can easily apply what I know to any song if I can imagine what to add to the song in order to make it my own, which is the beauty of playing of an instrument; you can make it your own. 

Seeing that this is my second time playing a Beatles song, what is your favorite music artist and why? 

Phillips, Mark, and Jon Chappell. Guitar for Dummies. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Pub., 2006. 

Guitar for Dummies: Stringing an Electric Guitar

If you own an instrument, you know you must always keep good care of it. While I try my best to do so, I tend not to replace the strings of my guitar and since I do it so rarely I end up having a store clerk do it for me at a music store despite how easy it is to do myself. While this book taught me many new techniques, they can also teach me the fundamentals of taking care of a guitar. When you play an instrument it is one thing to be able to play it, but it's another to understand how the construction of it works and how you can fix it if problems occur without the use of a "professional". I've noticed the fret board of guitar was dirty but the only way to thoroughly clean it was to take off the strings of the guitar, so I decided to look at the book to see how it could teach me.

Electric guitar strings go through more wear due to the less delicate style of playing them compared to an acoustic so it is important to change them. On page 306 in the section "Stringing an Electric Guitar" the text states "Generally, electric guitarists need to change their strings more often than do steel string acoustic or nylon string guitarists. Because changing strings is so common on electric guitars, builders take a more progressive approach to the hardware, often making changing strings very quick and easy"(Chappell 306). The text supports what I've found about changing guitar strings since the whole process is actually quite simple. I took the pliers you can see in the photo to snap the strings after I loosened them so they wouldn't snap at me immediately. After that was done, I cleaned the guitar fret board and started to apply the strings. The steps from the book came as followed (Chappell 306): 

Step 1: 

After easily anchoring the string at the bridge, the book says to pass the string through the hole, align it with the nut of the guitar and put it through the tuning pegs as shown in the picture. 

Step 2: 

Turn the tuning peg to secure the string. Keep on turning until the string is slightly above tune and make sure the excess string is secured around the peg as well. 

Step 3:

Cut off the excess string so that it doesn't stick off the head of the guitar and make sure your guitar is correctly tuned. Repeat these steps on all the strings and make sure that the strings of the guitar are an appropriate distance away from the fingerboard so they don't buzz when you play. 

Learning about how to play guitar strings has impacted me because while I play the guitar often, I don't often think about the actual mechanics and parts of the guitar, and how they work in order to produce the music they play. I feel like this is something that lots of people do with things they use, for example lots of us use laptops often but we don't think about how it actually works necessarily. That's why I think if any of us use any sort of invention often we should always learn how the object works. 

That being said, what type of person are you? Are you someone who likes to learn how things work and mess with them yourself if you have a problem, or do you just have someone else fix it for you? 

Phillips, Mark, and Jon Chappell. Guitar for Dummies. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Pub., 2006. Print.

Guitar for Dummies: Playing Fingerstyle

After a year of taking guitar lessons, I quit thinking I could learn enough on my own without having to pay such a high cost for lessons. While it's true that I have learned on my own and improved since then, I have avoided certain things that never really interested me. For example, when I took lessons I had to learn how to read sheet music when I rather learn music by listening to a song by ear and figuring out what notes to play myself. I may have been able to focus on the things I wanted to learn by not taking lessons, but it makes my guitar playing more one dimensional since I'm less likely to take up different styles I normally don't. Therefore, I wanted to learn something from the folk music section of the book since I probably wouldn't learn folk music on my own, which brings me to learning fingerstyle.

The song I played here is "Wake Me Up When September Ends" by Green Day which is a song that isn't played with fingerstyle, but I arranged it in a way that it mixes between the melody of the song and the actual notes the guitar plays.

Fingerstyle was found in the folk music section of the book because it is common practice in the folk genre that they don't use guitar picks which I'm accustomed to. However, this doesn't mean fingerstyle can only be played in the folk genre. To explain further from the book "Guitar for Dummies" which teaches fundamentals of guitar, on page 208 in the section 'Playing Fingerstyle', the text states "Your right-hand thumb plays the bass line while the fingers play the melody and inner voices for an even fuller and more complex sound"(Chappell 208). By applying this rule, I used my thumb to play the bass notes of the chords, then used my fingers to play the voice of the singer in the song. This style of playing was very awkward for me and even in this video I don't feel like I nailed it 100%, but it was still a good experience for me because it let me broaden my skills as a guitar player.

The song I played here is "Blackbird" by The Beatles. In the last video, I played a more complex song while this song is just a simple pattern and is simply the lead guitar part instead of the melody or bass. 

Learning this song shows that fingerstyle is a very versatile form of guitar playing. You can use it to change the sound of a song to make it more complex, or you can create a simple rhythm and pattern to write a well-known song. "Blackbird" follows the description said in the book where typically the thumb plays the bass strings and the fingers pluck upward to play the high strings (Chappell 208). Playing this song wasn't as hard for me, and made me feel more comfortable about using my fingers to play instead of my pick all the time. 

Before learning this new style, I felt uncomfortable and scared to try something different since I have been playing with a pick ever since I got my hands on the guitar. Trying this new style opens up a new realm of possibilities for my skills as a guitar player than before. Being able to learn these new styles makes me a better player since my versatility allows me to play in any shape or form without faltering or being scared of seeing something I've never seen before. This shows how doing something that you may be uncomfortable with can actually benefit you and make you stronger in that specific field whether you look at this at a musical, an academic, or an athletic standpoint. 

Seeing that fingerstyle is a different type of guitar playing that is usually meant for folk music, I wanted to know what is your favorite genre of music and why? 

Phillips, Mark, and Jon Chappell. Guitar for Dummies. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Pub., 2006. Print.

Guitar for Dummies: Special Articulation

All of us have a passion, from playing a sport, to reading a book. However, for me once I first got into music starting from trashy punk rock to the smooth sound of the blues, I wanted to play guitar. I got my first guitar in the fifth grade, and took lessons up to when I started teaching myself in the seventh grade. Sure, I improved since then and I have been playing guitar for five years now, but there are things that I taught myself that I'm not the sharpest at, so here I am learning from the book. This doesn't just apply with guitar, it applies with anyone's craft. Sometimes the best thing to do is go back and analyze the basics until you have fully mastered it.

The song I played here is the intro to "Castles Made of Sand" by Jimi Hendrix which includes techniques I learned from the book. Hendrix is who really got me into playing tougher pieces of guitar. To compare with me, what musician most influenced you into playing music, and if you don't play an instrument what instrument do you wish you could play and why? 

The book is broken up into sections based on techniques, styles, tips, etc. For this instance, I was looking to see how I can make my notes flow better by sliding the guitar. By doing this I can make my playing sound smoother as I try playing music like in the video. I learned little details from the book that made big differences. For example, on page 137 in the section 'Playing slides', "A glissando is an effect where all notes between the two principal notes can be heard"(Chappell 137). With this knowledge, I know varying the speed of my slide from one note to another can effect the overall tone of my playing.

What a slide looks like

Within this song, I had to do a "hammer on" which is when you finger a string without plucking the note but still being able to produce sound (Chappell 137). Traditionally, you do this after you pluck one note and just press on the next note of that same string to the energy from the first time you plucked resonates. During the song I would have trouble in certain scenarios because plucking a note on another string was too fast, but from the book I learned you can hammer on a string without plucking that string previously. All I had to do was just put more force into my finger when I struck the string and it enabled me to play the whole line in a smooth manner.

What a hammer on looks like

As you may tell, the things I'm fixing are just little things that make a difference and that was the point of me learning from this book. Most likely I won't learn the biggest fundamentals of playing guitar, but it can help me tune in on my little mistakes. This applies to anything people do. Professional basketball players are the best there are at playing basketball, but I guarantee you they don't simply stop practicing the small details in perfecting the best shot for a three pointer. No matter how good we are at something, there will always be room for improvement.

Phillips, Mark, and Jon Chappell. Guitar for Dummies. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Pub., 2006. Print.