When you are a beginner you need guidance and support to help you with getting sounds from the guitar. As you progress you may find that it is easy to get lost in the track of time while you are playing some of the ideas you have been given. You get totally absorbed by what you are doing at that very moment in time. Such is the power of music: Music connects you with the moment and makes you forget whatever worries were on your mind. That is one of the reasons why people love listening to music, going out to concerts or gigs.
The idea of the lessons on this blog is to provide you with some stimulus, ideas you can use for your own playing or just musical ideas which can stand on their own.
People who can play the guitar can still benefit of going over lessons which are designed with the beginner in mind. Most of my lessons do have an open character and can be played in many different ways:
~ When there is talk about strumming you can pick the idea instead of strum, this will require a different technique but since you can play the guitar you will know what to do.
~ If a lesson is about a particular chordsequence, you can add basslines or riffs in between the chords etc.
~ If a particular fingering for a chord is given, you can change the postion of the chord, if you know the fretboard you will know what you can do with the chord.
~ You can change the key of the idea, in most cases this means you will be playing in a different position on the fretboard.
Most people, especially intermediate and advanced players, tend to think, after having covered the basics, they need to move on to more “advanced scales and chords”. My own experience, and that of many other guitarplayers, is that the so called “easy stuff” is open for many different interpretations. You need to learn to apply whatever you know, to play in different contexts and styles. For example, there are many different ways to play a C chord on the guitar, and there are many things you can do with that same chord. Some of those ideas will be obvious, some are less common.
Most of the popular songs of the last 40 to 60 years are all very simple in terms of harmony [chordchanges] and melody. That is one of the reasons why people like them so much. However, most of these songs do sound great because they will have a special feel or just a little idea which makes the song sound slightly different from what you would expect it to be.
If you enjoy reading this blog, I would suggest trawling through the material and pick whatever takes your fancy, do not pay too much attention about the grading, and use the material for whatever purpose you want to use it for.
Eddie