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A = A, but I'm not so sure about B
Jan. 11th, 2009 11:22 amLast summer (as you may or may not recall), Jorie developed a Wiggles- and TMBG-based preoccupation with guitars which led to Grammy and Noreen giving her a child-sized guitar for her second birthday. She's still too little to actually do much with it besides strum the open strings with the guitar sitting on her lap, but she enjoys it. At the Music Together class that Jorie goes to with Sam, her music teacher urged us to keep the guitar in tune, which led me to start playing around with it, even though it's really too small for my hands.
I was coming at this from a position of complete non-musicianship, but I learned to play a few chords on this little kid's guitar (initially by looking at the "Chord Cards" that came with the guitar, a silly gimmick—they're these little chord charts with slots for the frets that you're supposed to slip under the strings so you can practice putting your fingers on the dots, but it's easier just to look at them). I soon learned the enchanting fact that, at least when it comes to chordal accompaniment, much pop, rock and folk music is not exactly rocket science, and you can start playing simple songs almost immediately, if not well—it's kind of like basic HTML circa 1994.
Then for Christmas, Sam and her folks got me a Seagull S6 and some accessories thereto (mine doesn't have the dark pickguard but it basically looks like that). Looking around, I get the impression that Sam really did her homework—it seems to be regarded as one of the best acoustic guitars you can buy without spending upwards of a thousand dollars, a good guitar for beginners or for professional musicians on a limited budget. It sounds nice to me. Of course, now that I have this lovely guitar it behooves me to actually learn how to play and take care of it.
And this affords me an opportunity to geek out about something new as well. I've always found music theory vaguely fascinating but essentially incomprehensible; I'd follow a couple of Wikipedia links and get lost in the weeds because, as a non-musician, I didn't have a visceral understanding of how any of this stuff sounded, nor the difficulties involved in playing it. Noodling around on our old piano a little helped me understand some of it, but what really helps is starting to learn to play an instrument for real, and to read a little music.
( some primitive music geekery )
I was coming at this from a position of complete non-musicianship, but I learned to play a few chords on this little kid's guitar (initially by looking at the "Chord Cards" that came with the guitar, a silly gimmick—they're these little chord charts with slots for the frets that you're supposed to slip under the strings so you can practice putting your fingers on the dots, but it's easier just to look at them). I soon learned the enchanting fact that, at least when it comes to chordal accompaniment, much pop, rock and folk music is not exactly rocket science, and you can start playing simple songs almost immediately, if not well—it's kind of like basic HTML circa 1994.
Then for Christmas, Sam and her folks got me a Seagull S6 and some accessories thereto (mine doesn't have the dark pickguard but it basically looks like that). Looking around, I get the impression that Sam really did her homework—it seems to be regarded as one of the best acoustic guitars you can buy without spending upwards of a thousand dollars, a good guitar for beginners or for professional musicians on a limited budget. It sounds nice to me. Of course, now that I have this lovely guitar it behooves me to actually learn how to play and take care of it.
And this affords me an opportunity to geek out about something new as well. I've always found music theory vaguely fascinating but essentially incomprehensible; I'd follow a couple of Wikipedia links and get lost in the weeds because, as a non-musician, I didn't have a visceral understanding of how any of this stuff sounded, nor the difficulties involved in playing it. Noodling around on our old piano a little helped me understand some of it, but what really helps is starting to learn to play an instrument for real, and to read a little music.
( some primitive music geekery )
