Knowing the Six strings

- Manideepa Paul

“ Anything which the individual does on his own out of interest gives the individual a feeling of productivity, a sense of achieving something and in turn happiness.”

This might sound a little too bookish and artful but such was exactly my case when I decided to give a try to learn Guitar!

From my very childhood I had a knack and desire for learning guitar but break never befell. Well somehow after around 9-10 years (yes! That long ughh…) the chance finally arrived!.

In the fresherman year I started saving up some money and within a month or two I had enough fund for getting my hands on the guitar. Yeah about how I got that much in such a short time is a topic of another time, I’ll list them here sometime later if you wanna too save some money too.

Next was how to learn how to play it, yeah i know you can learn anything nowadays from YouTube and other online sources but since I’m waaaay too lazy to do that all by myself , like what if i lost interest on it. As long as I've know myself, I’m bound to be demotivated at some point, we all do. That’s what human nature is like, for some people it’s actually good, cause they can have a break from a loop if they are pursuing something too hard, there's a chance of them burning out mid session, but for me this is like the final nail to my coffin, once I get demotivated unless or until some external force motivates me or even obligates me to do that stuff , I’m basically done for it.

What I need is a person to teach me that, cause you can’t learn bars and rhythms from something with a color range of 256, you need a actual person who can expose you to all the colors of music  …. And who else could me my Guitar tutor than the editor of this blog itself (and he teaches for free -the editor)… such tantrums!

All set and done, I still remember on a fine Saturday we met at the store to get myself something I really wanted for so long!! Yayyyy!!

After scouring for around 15-20 mins ( yeah real quick!) we found the most suitable guitar, the most appealing guitar, My guitar

 

I’ll never forget when i first held my guitar. I still remember the first day of bringing home the guitar and strumming the strings without any clue of the chords or whatsoever.

It was an acoustic no-name hand-me-down local store gem. The action was terrible, everything rattled, and there was something loose inside the guitar that I could never find. But I didn’t care, because along with that tattered guitar came hope and excitement to learn such an awesome instrument and bit of harmony too.

Since then I have been learning out the creeks and nooks of that music maker , tinkering with whatever little knowledge that gather from the weekly guitar/meetup I have with my editor and Oh God this is quite a challenge! Yet it is very exciting at the same time.

Well I have learnt a handful chords as of now and the sense of accomplishment is amazing! Finally being able to do what I desired for so long made me really happy. I anticipate to learn all that’s left in store for me and look forward to a day when i can play my favorite song. I’ll keep you guys updated on how’s this guitar thing is going with our occasion and now to regular blog post

I know I haven’t been regular and frequent enough with this and I’m apologetic for the same. I promise to be more frequent from now on to share my day-to-day experiences with all you peeps.

Till then, Adios!!

o btw your phalanges will hurt. period

Here’s a fact: Your fingers will hurt for a while when you first start playing. This happens for several reasons. One reason is, beginners tend to press down too hard on the strings. Another reason is the guitar’s action might be too high (action = the distance from the strings to the fret board). But, the main reason for calluses is that it’s a rite of passage, it just happens, it means you’re a guitar player. Welcome to the club! Too many beginner guitar player stop playing because their fingers hurt. But don’t quit! The pain goes away once your fingers callus. Just keep strumming away and you’ll be glad you stuck with it.

-editor