CC's Learning Log

ConstanceClaire · November 24, 2025, 7:58am

Was noodling a bit on the guitar last night and ended up with a descending progression playing a standard D chord but stepping down on the G string for each bar, then down to F# up on the D string, and it sounded really nice. Put a stuck 2 chord on there… an Em one I think, and an A alternating, also sounded nice, would probably need to bridge it.

I really enjoy the flexibility of moving one note around in a chord to give it some flavour, especially if there’s a lot of one chord being played and it’s just one instrument with no band behind it. In my own mucking around with lifting the first finger up and down in the C chord, and playing a C or a D on the B string in a G chord, I recognised iconic parts of songs just from that single note alternation.

Watching Jesse Welles playing any of his songs and when he isn’t showing off how well he can play, he often adds colour to simple tunes lifting and placing fingers in a chord, and doing hammer ons/pull offs. I think it will open up the ability to be musically creative with a limited beginner skill and knowledge set.

Haven’t had much to report, hence no log entries. Left shoulder is giving me grief so it’s limiting my play time, but I had the guitar adjusted and new strings added the other week so I’m back into playing it more regularly. I’m gonna need to change strings more often than every 18 months I guess…

Anyway I haven’t really become better at anything, although I was having a go at Valerie on the app and while I cannot for the life of me keep the time for some reason, I was actually managing to get the F chord not too muddy and on time for most of it?! I still have to keep readjusting the guitar so my angle of attack is constantly changing, and as my shoulder seizes up my hand doesn’t cooperate like I want (that’s when I stop playing), but I really was getting quite downhearted about not being able to manage that chord properly so I’m pretty relieved/concerned it was a fluke evening!

In lieu of any news/avoyps, please enjoy these pictures from my garden (and the critters therein), which used to be a big wad of stone consistency clay and forced me into becoming a begrudging gardener.

And this one I took of a really great spring sky!

roger_holland · November 24, 2025, 8:04am

Well Constance , you did a nice job …
I see everything that was here in better times, but now it is completely returning to the soil and will only be exposed to sunlight again in better forms next year

Greetings

GrumpyMac · November 24, 2025, 8:51am

what lovely flowers
I love to garden , when you spend all your time at home behind a computer its nice to have some hours outside in the fresh air

we’re the complete opposite here , it snowed 2 days ago with -6° C
now its raining and its all muddy

so tell me
do you consider trying a smaller guitar ? it might relieve your shoulder

ConstanceClaire · November 24, 2025, 11:45am

I don’t love gardening but I do love having a garden and the satisfaction of having built it! I planted lots of fragrant and colourful things, and useful ones. I’ve used the thyme and the sage. I have lavender, and a yellow imp which has an intense lemon smell, and alyssum which smells very sweet. And a few natives. The garden is buzzing with bees! It does give me peace to look at it. And it’s helping keep the dust down.

I’m not one to rush out and buy expensive things, and I don’t really have anywhere to put a spare guitar… I may go to the music shop and try smaller guitars if I can’t get it sorted, but I’m working on my shoulder. It does just flare up sometimes, and once it’s happened it can take a while to ease up, but I never used to play guitar so it was less of an issue. I think I sleep on it wrong sometimes, like it collapses under me and pinches somewhere in there and gets inflamed. It’s been happening since I was a kid.

I do also want to try on a dreadnought at the music shop just so I understand exactly how huge they are. But I think I need to feel like I’m an intermediate skill level at least before I get another instrument. Or wait until I’ve sorted my life out a little and buy it as a reward for successful adulting.

ConstanceClaire · January 5, 2026, 8:26am

I’m approaching this year differently than the last. For starters, a lot of stuff got in the way last year, my shoulders both acted up individually, and I had some significant insomnia (although not as bad as it was in 2024,(or 2023? hard to gauge)), and that all came together to make me bad at learning guitar. I devolved into basically practicing the same couple of tunes, did not get them perfect or even of a consistent reliable quality after a full year, and ended most ‘sessions’ with a huff of dissatisfaction. I am an impatient perfectionist so some of that is unavoidable.

So, I’m returning to sensible guitar practice. I’m continuing with the lessons, which I basically tossed aside for a year or more, and going back to practice exercises with songs as a bonus / thing to work towards. I’ve been doing scales, open C, major, and uh, that E one that skips the semitone jumps (my fingers know it but it’s been over a year since I watched the lesson and can’t remember the name of it - example has us starting on open E string rather than F fret so no first finger used). I’m focussing on individual technique quirks to fix, and since my left shoulder is still giving me manageable grief, I’m honing in on arm position to minimise pain/joint fatigue, thinking about how hard I’m pressing on strings, juggling that with paying attention to my right shoulder which wings out and starts hurting if I forget about it for too long.

I did actually get better at things over the last year, but not by much at all.

On a specifically positive note, I have got the F barre chord pretty well working 99% of the time and am slowly getting quicker to situate my fingers. The module I’m finishing up has Coldplay’s The Scientist as a benchmark song, which is a really lovely tune, and has a bunch of barre chords in it so I think that will really help me get better at situating my fingers quickly. The chords aren’t full barre, but for a full barre I can make the bottom strings ring out, the issue has always been the 3rd/4th finger muting issues, and trying to bend my middle finger onto the string without locking it very straight, since it’s not easy to fluidly move a locked joint.

I shan’t work on the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. The riff was easy enough but I just really don’t like their music to a level that it actively annoys me.

It’s summer, we’re coming up to a heatwave this week but I’m going to keep working on my sleep routine so that I can get back to waking up a bit earlier (not too early, I’m decidedly not a morning person), and I’ll practice my guitar in the morning before I get on with the day, while my schedule allows for it.

I may upload my completed songs as the year goes on. For my first AVOYP I was so thrilled to get as good enough to enjoy it and share it, even though there were mistakes. Come 2025 and I couldn’t bear to post a finished song, even to the chrissy thread, because I just couldn’t abide the little mistakes that I alternated between in takes. This year, I’m going to try and have that beginner attitude of ‘wow, look what I did!’ rather than my natural attitude of ‘well that was flawed, appalling. Shame, shame!’

This is already an essay, anyway, happy new year to you friends, and may you be more patient and gracious with yourself than I have been with myself. I’m gonna work on thinking of myself as somebody else so I can apply basic human decency and realistic expectations inwardly.

domi7 · January 6, 2026, 11:43am

Oh, it’s nice to read an update, and a rather positive one!

That’s a really good idea!
But me too, I hated my recording sessions this year and only uploaded things when I felt urged to do. I feel like my playing is better while noodling and during a good amount of time, but playing a song well from start to finish is really hard for me and most often doesn’t turn out nice.
I was going to say if you posted more songs, I would do too as an encouragement, but actually this would rather be more of a menace in my case!

Haha
But yes, please don’t be so hard on yourself!
Your performances won’t have to be always as outstanding as “Anchor”.
If you keep at it, even just a little, but regularly you’ll slowly get where you want.

I’m totally with about not practicing a song you don’t enjoy.
I don’t know how you go about this, but I’ve got a big list of songs that I love (and which I possibly would want to play) that sometimes gets additions when I stumble upon one that I yet forgot. And sometimes I have these sessions browsing for lessons on these, or checking the chords to see how “doable” they would be now (or soon, possibly), or even when I feel like it and it’s a song I want to learn anyway one day, regardless if I could tackle it now or really difficult, sometimes, I’ll start transcribing it on my own ( too rarely yet ).
And when I found out how hard that song would possibly be to learn, I classify the list (now, later… )
Of course, in that list there’s also a row on singability…

Silvia80 · January 10, 2026, 12:29pm

Hi Connie, I finally made it to read through your Log and got to know you a bit better! I never suffered from chronical insomnia but sporadically the quantity and quality of my sleep get so bad that everyday life becomes exhausting and guitar practice feels like going round in circles, I can well understand your frustration about this. My actual struggle is food, as I got 40 yo it seemed like my body started making a fool out of me and I gained 12 kg without even realising; the health of my stomach, feeling sick and lacking energy made me take action, but it was a trial and error for a few years and only in 2025 I managed to really start consolidating new healthy dieting habits.

You mentioned shoulders pain and to that I add the neck even more. I can’t sit practicing guitar for more than 30 minutes as the left side of my shoulders starts getting on fire, aches and burns like hell…it happens that I overdo and keep on practicing but it’s not good, I have to remind myself not to do it. The gym helps, even if I never manage to be consistent as I wish.

I think it’s normal to be the strictest judges of ourselves and with guitar I wasn’t much nice to myself self either in the beginning, I often thought that I wouldn’t be able to learn properly and wondered if I’d not better quit…that led only to frustration and that not feeling good resulted in my playing, until I decided to give up any sort of expectations and just focus on well being and be able to just enjoy that little daily guitar time.
Progress is slow (well I guess there are faster learners) so going slow seems a very good idea. I’m also pretty unable to complete whole songs if they’re more than 3 minutes long and I make a lot of mistakes, especially if it’s strumming! Let’s try to be more indulgent towards ourselves and develop more this attitude, as you say

Well done on your garden, it looks so beautiful! I would love so to have a colourful garden too, but I’m lazy and take care of it so rarely during the year that it always just feels like “deforesting”!

Uh…I didn’t mean to write a poem! Looking foward to your LL updates, it’ll be easier now to follow in real time.

ConstanceClaire · January 14, 2026, 5:57am

Not an LL entry, but this song is going to be transcribed and maybe made into a tutorial by someone talented at some point, of that I am sure, so it’s going on my dreamer songs list.

Can’t believe I’m going to see this guy play live in two weeks! What a musician!!

ConstanceClaire · January 17, 2026, 2:06am

I have shoulder exercises too, but I’m also not as consistent as I should be. I did buy a fancy pillow that’s helped me not wake up having hurt the shoulder, so if you have that issue it might be worth trying a fancy pillow. Can’t buy a pillowcase to fit them, though, so I just lay it on top.

I hope we both enjoy our guitar this year.

Silvia80 · January 17, 2026, 10:52am

I had a look at different pillows, bought one in memory foam but I didn’t find it comfortable at all. Which type is yours? Can you share a picture or details?

I had a look at the video you shared…look how he is both consistent with the forearm and loose with the wrist amazing sounding Rhythm Guitar! Enjoy the concert!

ConstanceClaire · January 18, 2026, 8:44am

(I was going to send this as a message since it’s long, but just in case someone else is having shoulder issues I’ve put it here. So if you aren’t interested in pillow stuff scroll past this wall of text. )

I can’t stand memory foam, you just sink into it and it traps all the heat. I had sleepovers at a friend’s house when I was young and slept on two stacked thin memory foam mattresses, sank halfway into them and had to climb out of my indent to roll over!

This is the one I bought, although it seems to be discontinued… it’s just a polyester fill, like most standard pillows, but dense enough to hold its shape with just enough squish for comfort. It’s designed for someone sleeping on their back between the two blue lumps, or the other way around for side sleeping.

I side sleep. With this pillow, my head dips slightly down into the stitched divot, but my neck does not - it’s supported by the pillow. With a normal pillow my head sinks down further and the pillow is lower, which means I roll my shoulders under to keep my neck relaxed, which can lead to pinching nerves and tendons and inflammation problems.

I tested a pillow my mum bought for herself made of latex. It felt comfortable when I first lay on it, but latex is too bouncy for me and I woke up with a sore neck. You might love a latex pillow, Mum does, but it depends on if you are hyper-flexible or not. I’m a bit extra stretchy, so while I was asleep my muscles and tendons were working overtime to stabilise my neck as I breathed and moved, so even though her pillow was good height for my shoulders it made all my neck muscles tense. Basically an overnight workout!

If you aren’t sure if you are hyper-flexible; you can tell by movements and body positions that you find easy without training or stretching to achieve them. Like always being able to touch your toes or reach past them, even on tippy-toes; being able to bend your head so far back that it lies on your shoulders at the back; being able to cross your arms behind your back easily or even go further and grab your sides like that; reaching up between your shoulder blades easily.

Also if your knees bend back too far, or when you hold your arms out straight they bend back at the elbows, that’s an overstretch and it’s your ligaments and tendons stretching, not your muscles. If that sounds like you I would stay away from a bouncy latex pillow.

I still need to get a scan and see the physio, as my shoulder is still a problem, but the pillow helped with the sleeping posture part of the problem.

You basically need a pillow that makes space for your shoulders if you sleep sideways, and keeps your neck in a neutral position and supports it.

**
Jesse Welles is amazing and can play so well! I’m so happy to get the chance to see him live!