Learn to play guitar

Oh, man I slacked off way on this project. The gamedev project started to require more attention, had some difficulties at work which drained my energy and the time I was spending on this just went down the toilet. I still really enjoyed the time I spent learning this though, so I definitely want to continue it in the future. If all goes well I’m hoping to pick this up in the coming weeks as something I want to keep doing for longer than just the 30 days I had initially reserved for it.

When I do learn some new interesting things I might keep posting updates here, so stay tuned. To be continued… (hopefully)

I spent some more time improving my chords, making sure I memorized them well and playing them a few times to keep them fresh. After noticing that some of the lessons were starting to fade away a bit, I also decided to take some more notes after I completed certain lessons. I decided to write these down in my own words, as to better remember them and also be able to easily look back at them later on.

After chatting with some people in the Discord about my progress, I also decided to try and learn my first song. I’ve been trying to play “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash. The song only uses 3 chords, so it’s relatively easy to play. After watching a tutorial video on it, I was filled with excitement, but turns out I can’t play a song perfectly after 3 sessions yet. What a bummer. I’m kidding of course, but it did make me realize in which areas I still need to improve. Switching between chords is a big one and making sure that I don’t mute the strings before striking a new note or chord.

I’m going to keep practicing chord switching, as per my week 2 goal and try to get better at it. Now and then I’ll see if I’ve improved by trying out the song again and seeing if it sounds any better. If I can play the song with any confidence by the end of week 3 or 4 I’d be very happy.

The first thing I did today was work on tuning the guitar. Luckily there’s plenty of good apps for that nowadays, so it was really easy to get it to sound right. I also bought a bunch of guitar picks, so I actually have something proper to strum with (see picture below). Before you ask why I bought 30 guitar picks; they were basically just as expensive as buying 1 or 2 and these are all in a different thickness, so I can try some different ones out. Just so you know ;).

Besides that I focused on getting some more practice with the chords I had learned (both of which I almost entirely had forgotten) and just improving in general. I found a really nice free course online that I’m going to follow, that goes over all the basics. After following some of these lessons, I already got a lot better at switching between chords and playing them in relatively quick succession (at least for my standards). I included a little audio recording below of me switching between the E, A and D chord a bit.

I’m quite happy with the progress I’ve made and I’m looking forward to improving even further and learning more. Hopefully I can still make my final goal of trying to play a simple song by the end of the DK30. The thing I have the most difficulty with right now is smoothly transitioning between the chords. This is both an issue because my fingers don’t know where to go right away and I’m not sure how to move them there without just killing the entire sound in the process. Both things I hope to improve on next time!

I started today by watching an intro video (see below) on how to sit, hold the guitar, what each string means, how to read guitar chords and learn some basic chords. The first two chords I’ve learned are the C and A chords and they’re going pretty well. My biggest issue at the moment is just switching between them and not getting my fingers or hand to hurt. That just takes practice I imagine, so I’m going to stick with it and see where I end up.

Next up I want to actually tune the guitar a bit, because I’m pretty sure it’s extremely out of tune at the moment. Once I got that going and I feel a bit more confident on the sounds I’m producing, I’ll try to record a bit to see if I can notice an improvement across the DK30.