My Journey in to Music Part 1
It would seem that music, singing, and guitar playing is a lifetime pursuit if you want to be any good. Well maybe not if you have an aptitude and started young. There are prodigies who just seem to be able to do it without learning, and others that were born with a voice, seemingly finding it easy, indeed a gift. For me well I started late, musically inept, untrained ears, and a voice that’s never in tune. So you would wonder why I would pursue it.
Well I have always just wanted to, somewhere inside me pulls me towards a desire to be able to play my guitar and sing a song or two, perform them on a stage perhaps, not for the enjoyment of an audience so much, but for the gratification gained from doing it well.
Some years back now, I started to play the guitar, at first I couldn’t even strum it, the right hand just wouldn’t go up and down, just didn’t have any rhythm whatsoever. A strum pattern was given to me, DDUUDU (Down Down Up Up Down Up), and I practiced that relentlessly, with a few chord changes for a long long time. I’d pick the guitar up for a few weeks or so then leave it for months. I wrote a song or two as I couldn’t sing anyone’s else’s. This spasmodic method went on for many years, learning chords, the F and C and Barr chords appearing impossible with my fattish fingers and lack of dexterity in the left hand. I tended to want to play a soft melodic style so I started teaching the fingers how to pick each string rather than the full strum method. I went through many pick styles, thumb picks, finger pics, standard pick, eventually just to use my fingers, down with the thumb and up with the rest except for the little one which generally rested on the guitar body to hold the hand in a steady position. I now use a combination of standard pick and fingers and fingers only. I played, or tried to, the Barr chord shape for F major (Em shape with a Barr) as the normal shape seemed impossible, and while this wasn’t easy it lead me into Barr chords shapes. Many chord shapes appear impossible as a beginner, but after a time become easy.