Artax's Learning Log

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21

@artax_2 Sorry to hear that interest may be waning for you. It’s totally okay to take a break though if you feel that way. For me personally, if I start feeling aimless or start feeling any sign of being burnt out, I take on a challenge like learning a song that means a lot to me or if I feel it can provide me with good experience value. It can be tricky to find something that’s challenging enough to keep you busy for a few weeks, and keep you interested enough at the same time to grind away at it, but it can be done. I look at every challenge as a stepping stone to get me closer to my goals.

A bit like taking on a specific project that keeps you focused, but it does require a weird kind of obsession to be listening to the same song over and over again and dissect it like that. I feel weird sometimes constantly replaying the same song in the car as the resident DJ while I drive my family places but I would like to believe they understand.

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Hi Stacey -

Please don’t give guitar away. Please.

If your new Fender isn’t inspiring you to play, then pick up your FAVOURITE guitar and play it. If Grade 4 doesn’t excite or inspire you, leave it for the moment and find something to play that you LOVE. Justin has often given this as advice. Try to re-engage with the feeling you had when you first started playing guitar, what it was that drew you to guitar in the first place.

I came across you in your “Small Hands” posts. I have small hands too. 7.5" span. 3" middle finger. This makes playing more challenging than it is for players with longer fingers. People will advise to adjust this and that, which can help for sure, but small hands are a handicap for playing guitar in my opinion and no one will convince me otherwise unless they have the authority by having hands the size of mine or smaller! A person can be short in height and still have very long fingers. Tim Reynolds who plays with Dave Matthews is a perfect example. A guitar teacher I had was a similar height to me but had fingers 1/2" longer than mine. He acknowledged that I would struggle with certain things because of my hand size.

Please don’t give up. Some songs may simply be unplayable as shown in the lesson. I can’t form the chords for Gravity that Justin and other instructors show in their lessons. Never going to happen. It really got me down and I’ve just left it for now. I can play the lead intro solo which I love and this makes me happy.

Hope to get a response from you and to hear that you’re still playing. :blush:

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Hi there, thank you for the encouragement. In fact, today I did pick up the guitar and played along a bit to one of Justin’s newer song lessons.

I’ve been thinking, and its interesting, when I think about all the things that have led me to stop being inspired to practice. I think 75% of it is comfortability, like in my house/practice space. The other 25% is about what you mentioned- finding what it was that made me inspired when I started. I have never heard anyone else say this, ever, but I never really wanted to play the guitar, I just wanted to know HOW to play the guitar. It wasn’t ever love for guitar music that made me want to play, like 99.999999999% of other people (though I do absolutely have a deep love and endless appreciation for guitar music and always have). It was and is sheer curiosity as to how someone makes this mysterious instrument sound so incredible that made me want to learn. The trade off is that once I learn the magician’s tricks, the illusion isn’t as amazing. Playing my most loved songs technically can and will ruin that song’s magic. It has happened on piano many times. And while that is true to an extent, it doesn’t make me appreciate the instruments or players’ talents and hard work any less, it simply makes me less interested in playing.

The comfortability factor is that of my house- I don’t particularly like my practice space. It’s too small, it’s taking up a bedroom, its not optimized with my preferred lighting or organized in a way that I am happy with. I could rearrange some things but it would be a lot of work and I’m not sure I could improve it enough, because I can’t even really envision how I would like it to be. Expectation is probably my greatest weakness and biggest barrier to happiness, in all things, not just in this guitar journey.

So, there are many mental roadblocks there to overcome and I have always been a person who gets stuck behind mental roadblocks.

Yes small hands, the thing no one will acknowledge and everyone will diminish for some reason. I think people think its better to say you’re crazy than to say you can’t do it. I don’t want anyone to write me off and say my small hands means I can never play the instrument. But I would feel so much better if someone simply said ‘yes, you’ll have a hard time and there are lots of things you might not ever be able to do, but there are so many other things you still can do and here’s a bunch of them’. Yes there are all these microadjustments and I have to say I have either made plenty and didn’t realize any of them, or I just got used some of the worst feeling hand positions. But even after three or four years, things still feel unnatural with my fretting hand. Having to stretch my fingers way out from the base knuckles isn’t ever going to feel right. I still think many simple chord changes, like any chord to D feels terrible. I don’t like the D chord, and the only chord I hate more than D is C. I loathe C. I don’t have big enough fingertips to both fret a note AND mute the fret/string above it. The short fingers just make it to where I can’t get up next to the fretwire sometimes, and the notes buzz. I don’t know what to do about it, I guess just turn up the gain, which I intend to be doing because I want to play hard rock and metal, not classical and articulate music. I have to move the entire hand sometimes instead of moving fingers. So far I have just pushed through the difficulty physically, but that hasn’t helped tremendously mentally. So I just don’t let anyone hear or watch me play.

I am trying! There is also something that maybe I should ask ChatGPT to explain for me- about what is happening when we get paralyzed by non-action or lack of direction. Sometimes it seems like too much commitment to get up and go to the guitar room. I have a guitar here in the living room but its still hard to pick it up sometimes, even though I know I can put it down 5 minutes later. Or to put in a DVD to watch a movie, or to do any particular thing. Committing feels bad sometimes. That has definitely contributed.

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I have rearranged the furniture in my music room area a few times also. I just move things. I find the more riom I make the better. I am about to change it again. The sun is now shining right into my eyes during my afternoon practice so its impossible to see the monitor. I was not using this space last year so I didnt realize. Its hard to stay 100% all the time.

I have multiple hobbies. Its ok to jump from one to another. I think thats what makes us well rounded people. Especially those of us who are passionate about things. Maybe do some hiking before the weather fully changes and then when its super cold you can come back. Perhaps there is a musical side project. Dont force yourself or you may just feel resentful. Sometimes I let my self put the guitar down and I just go up to the mountain. I know when it starts calling. What every you do dont give you gear away. Gear lasts a long time. Music gear, climbing gear snoboarding, heck even sewing. :rofl:

Today, tommorow or even next year. When ever you pick it up, it will be waiting, just like a loyal dog, ready for your caress.

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25

Hey Stacey,

Maybe this is it:

What gets me through wanting to put my guitars and amp out on the nature-strip is my LOVE for music, for guitar and for my guitars! I truly LOVE playing guitar. I get frustrated, disappointed, disheartened, we all do for various reasons, it’s part of the process. I’ve been doing BLIM 3 for the last 5 months and there are days when I just can’t face another blues lick! So, I do what @Ontime does, get out into nature.

Wanting to know “HOW to play” is a very different thing from really wanting to play in your heart of hearts, no matter the challenges.

This is an interesting comment:

I can honestly say that for me learning how to play my favourite songs technique-wise is just the beginning. The more I play, the more I appreciate subtleties of the song. Phrasing and dynamics are what can make all the difference. I love to listen to the music I’m making as I’m making it and ask myself “what can I do to improve this?”

Maybe guitar isn’t your “path with a heart” and that’s ok. Here’s some Native American wisdom that’s worth considering:

Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself and yourself alone one question. Does this path have a heart? A path without a heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with a heart is easy, it doesn’t make you work at liking it.

Do you mean “commitment” or “effort”? When your find your thing, or next thing, or it finds you, you will want to do it so much that the problem won’t be starting, but stopping! :rofl:

If you do decide to continue with guitar, Justin has two excellent teachers, Richard Coles and Dave Birnie who could really help you with the things you struggle most with - but you would have to video yourself. Or even consider a private lesson or two.

By the way, I have a beautiful KOA wood Taylor GS Mini acoustic guitar. It has a magnificent tone and the frets fit well under my small hands making it a joy to play.

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26

New year new learning log post.

I have been practicing since my last couple of posts where I was expressing loss of interest, fatigue, etc. I definitely think the only thing keeping me going right now is the fact that I put a guitar in the living room about 6 months ago, or maybe more. My practice has been happening on the couch versus the guitar room, which I already went over in another post so I don’t need to rehash that. It’s a cheap electric with no amp, so its like eating bland raw vegetables, but having it in the living room and sitting (with poor posture, ugh) on the couch is my compromise right now.

Actually that is a little bit of a lie, I did go into the guitar room over Christmas vacation to check that my gear is up to date with the latest firmwares. I have the Boss Katana amp (and Boss Tone Studio), the XSonic Airstep Kat pedal controller, and the XSonic ULooper pedal, all four of which have firmware to be cognizant of.

Oh, and I had gotten a fancy schmancy D’addario pedal board on Amazon (I literally don’t need a pedal board because the Katana has all the effects built in but it was free with my type of Amazon account, so I had to get it). So I wanted to play around with using the pedal board with my Airstep and ULooper. I thought it would tidy things up in there, instead of the pedals I do have being kind of laying around willy nilly, and it did help to tidy them up.

Awhile back I had finally settled on some Katana patches that I’d assigned to my four available channels on my amp. One is a clean setting, one is an octave effect and reverb, one is a high gain lead setting, and one is a metal, heavily distorted setting. It had been so long since I had tried to use any effect on the amp, that I’d forgotten what patches I had assigned to my channels and how to even navigate through the amp itself. This had certainly eroded my confidence and interest in using the amp to be honest. It eroded my faith in these modeling type amps and associated applications altogether.

Not to start yelling at the sky but I really am suffering technology fatigue. Not that I can’t adapt or keep up. I just literally don’t like the way it all works these days- having to use more and more screens, more and more passwords, more and more user interfaces. I already do that 40+ hours a week at work. Like I want my hobbies to look like my work. And its EVERYTHING, from home, to work, to the dr office, to the vet, to how I control my house comfort, my hobbies, my car, literally everything is a device, an app, a screen. And now the push by society and corporations to use Chatgpt and AI. I’m only 46 and I’m SICK OF IT!

Anyway, I digress. My patches- so when I went to ensure all the gear had been updated to the current firmware, it gave me the opportunity to practice some songs I’d learned and reacquaint myself with the amp effects and my foot controller. Much needed.

Of course Seven Nation Army benefits from the octave effect. Using the foot controller lets me turn the octave setting off and on throughout the course of that song. I put that gorgeous new Fender on the wall and got my metal guitar back out for use with the amp. Ahh, much better.

And I did learn a new song recently, Connection by the Elastics. Has a couple of new types of finger movement that I hadn’t used before. And one thing I have complained about in the past I noticed I have improved a LITTLE bit on, which is ear transcribing. For Connection, I picked out half of the song by ear in the first handful of minutes. Nice. The more complex parts I had to watch a tutorial for. Its okay- I noticed progress. Maybe this was an easy song to pick out but the confidence boost is a good thing regardless. And Connection sounds really good on my metal guitar with metal effects.

Another song I am revisiting is Enter Sandman by Metallica. I have pretty much gotten the first handful of riffs to sound good but I think it’s time to start looking at the second half of the riffs. So, I’ve been prepping my brain for that and reviewing the song lesson and doing some slow practice there.

Looking a little better than it was over the last few months of the year, which like I said before, I know myself and the end of summer, the holidays and winter really do a number on me negatively. I’m halfway through to better days.

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