My guitar playing started a few months ago. Well, actually, it started many many years ago, but over the past 10 years or so, it has been rather sporadic. Usually I would play for a few days, not feel like I was making any progress and hide the guitars back under the bed.
This time, I tried to keep myself doing it. I devised a scheme. I decided to write a quick group of CGI programs to list songs I wanted to learn and update the progress of them as I went along. This has been working pretty well. I got a list of about 20 songs I wanted to learn, found the tablature and started practicing. I even made CDs of the songs I was working on.
Over the past few months I have gotten better and better at playing. Originally, I was psyched that I was playing again. I enjoyed that I was starting to have calluses on fingers, I loved that I learned some new songs, etc. Slowly I started to expand the songs I wanted to learn. Now I probaby have about 25ish songs that I know pretty well.
The next step for me at this point has been working on singing and playing at the same time. If you have never done this, it is VERY difficult. The reason it is so difficult is that you really need to play guitar on auto-pilot and think of the words to the song. For a while I could not do this to save the life of me. It totally screwed up my playing. Now, as I have gotten better and better at guitar, I can almost pull this off. I don't have the best voice in the world, but I can usually at least stay somewhat in tune :) This has been really nice for me. Even tonight, I was able to pretty much learn a song and be able to sing along with it in just a few attempts. The funniest part? I don't even own the CD, I was going on what I remembered from hearing many friends play it over and over.
The real next step for me is to go back and re-learn all the music theory and then apply it to guitar. I used to be very good at this (aced the class I took in college), but have forgotten most of it. The applying it to guitar is going to be even more difficult. I really need to learn the notes on the neck of the guitar MUCH better. Then, I will actually be able to solo some more :) Right now, I basically just play chords and some parts of songs, but actually jamming and being able to play along will be much more fun.
Hopefully I will work on this over the next couple of weeks. I think I am going to play with a buddy of mine on Sunday for a few songs. We'll see what happens. Should be interesting to see if I can pull off what I can do at home on a stage. Maybe I will even sing one or two ;)
If I can get the second half of this learning process and the get the music theory part down, it will really be fun to go down on Sunday and really be able to jam back and forth with my friend.
