Guitar
I bought an acoustic guitar a couple of weeks ago and started taking lessons. It has been almost a decade since I last played an instrument. It has been going well so far; I’ve adjusted to reading notes in treble clef fairly well and I’ve developed good muscle memory for reading notes and playing them.
Chords/triads are giving me trouble so far, both reading and getting into position. My instructor has told me that reading them will come with time and will be just like reading single notes. Chords will also come, albeitl, with much practice I’m sure.
Because of my previous exposure to music he’s been getting into a lot of theory so far, in fact, of the 3 half hour lessons I’ve had (though all have gone an hour or more so far) we’ve only played for maybe 20 minutes total. We spend more time going over the relationshiop between scales, chords, and how the guitar is tuned.
My instructor also builds guitars as well, so he took my low-end $180 Ibanez starter guitar and has done a lot to it to make it sound better and play better/easier. I don’t understand all of it, but he adjusted/sanded the nut and bridge, adjusted the string height, and re-strung it with much nicer strings; Thomastik Infeld JS111’s, which are jazz strings that are much lighter than the previous strings and are flat wound instead of round wound, which makes it much much easier to play.
The book I’m using is Modern Method for Guitar: Volumes 1, 2, 3 Complete by William G. Levitt. It’s a very thorough book with a ton of information packed into each page. We’ve only been though the first four or five pages because there’s so much being presented at once. It’s very satisfying learning the theory behind this because I didn’t learn much when I was younger, due to either my instructor not bothering to explain it more than just by mentioning it in passing once or my not caring enough to pay attention.
I hope to be good enough in a year or two to be able to play stuff like Dave Matthews Band and the like. That kind of thing is full of complicated chords and strumming though, so I know its a waaaays off. Something to work towards.
