Lesson 42 Tuesday 29th October 2013

The start of the lesson we warmed up the fingers by playing the Animals song “House Of The Rising Sun”. I can see that this is a good tune to get me to play the chords clean as you pluck the individual strings and you can then know if you are holding them right or not.

As usual it took me a few goes to get it right even on chords that in practiced I had got fine. After a few false starts the notes did start to ring out with A and C sounding ok and even D sort of passable too. However I did get stuck on F which does not ring out but gives a depressing thud.

The F has been a bit of a problem form me mainly because finger one has to hold down strings 1 and two while fingers two holds string three and finger three holds down string four.

While doing this I think I am not putting enough pressure on finger one or I put loads on and the other two fingers are not straight so that they bend and mute out other strings. I have been practicing this one a lot and even though it is not there I think it has improved.

I run through the tune a few times. At the moment there is a big gap between each chord and the strumming of them is slow and deliberate. I have tried to speed it up and make it flow better but at the moment when I do that it sounds worse with loads of missed notes. My major problem is as ever movement from one chord to another which I feel is getting better slowly but surely.

We next looked at my progress on the riff in the Madness song “Our House”. 

Again this took several attempts to get part the first few plucks. I was resting my plucking hand on the bridge which did make things easier. My main problem appears to be that I want my eyes to be in both places. Either looking at where my left hand fingers are or what string I am plucking. My teacher thought it would be better if I just pluck downwards as I have a habit of just doing up plucks which I then have problems finding the next string. This did help as I could get past the first part.

For the final part of my lesson we looked at the song “Maggie May” by Rod Stuart.

We only really had time to look at the intro of the song.

The E chord is played a bit different.

What I did find is that I could play all of the chords without having to take finger 3 off. The rhythm for this took me a few moments to get too.

I had a few attempts and there was some notes ringing out. The main one I was not happy with was D. I went through the chord and could not understand why it had such a bad buzz to it. Upon looking at me doing it my teacher could see that I was not muting the top string with my thumb. As soon as I did this it made a big difference.

I feel that holding down chords is getting easier and sounding better. However I still need to practice the moving from one to another as I do have to sometimes have a big thinking space to remember where my fingers must go.