I’m Levi from Reston, VA and just started a little over a week ago. I took some lessons in high school way back in the 1980s, but never developed past some some fairly basic stuff, and eventually sold my acoustic and electric guitar (and amp), or maybe I gave it away, I can’t recall. My half brother is very musical and plays the guitar and piano, and my daughter and nephew are also pretty musical as well. My daughter left her electric guitar at home when she moved away (she has an acoustic with amplification), so I’m finally getting back to trying to learn how to play, and so far I like Justin’s teaching style and deliberate pacing.
For the past week I’ve mainly been practicing A to D to A transitions and feel like I can do them pretty quickly (around 30 per minute). I’ve been trying to build “stamina” but my fingers still hurt after playing for a while, although that time has increased over the last week. One thing that has been difficult is finding songs that I can play with A to D that I’m familiar with. I find slowing YouTube tracks down to sound unnatural, but also it seems that many of the example songs aren’t actually in the key of A, so you need a capo to play them? I don’t have one and want to avoid using one until they are introduced. I did actually find one song on YouTube that seemed to be shifted from it’s original INTO the key of A so that I could play along. Otherwise I’m looking at potentially getting the app, but wasn’t sure if it essentially is filling the need that I’m talking about - having a bunch of songs that actually are transposed into A from another key so I can actually play them as part of practice? If so, I’ll probably end up getting it, just wondering…
Not sure where you are in JG Grade 1 at the moment, but Justin gives you several 2 chord songs here super-easy-2-chord-songs-b1-114
If you have already done these and want to move on then I would move on with the grade 1 lessons and move on as Justin says at the end of grade 1. In 2 there is more to look at and do.
" Here are some guidelines to help you decide:
You’ve memorized the A and the D chords.
You can change between A and D at least 30 times a minute. If this seems impossible and you can’t achieve it after a few weeks, you can move. Later on our journey, you’ll learn some other tricks to switch faster between chords. I don’t want you to get bored! :)"
I personally think the app is a good starter tool, but I would not get too reliant on playing along with it or other App based tutorials.
Thanks so much for responding. Yeah, I’m on Grade 1 and finished module 2, and yeah, basically I feel like I can already do the transition 30 times in a minute and I’ve memorized the A and D chords after just a week or so. I have looked at the song list on the website, filtered it for A and D, and Grade 1 Beginner, and at least of the few songs I’m familiar with, most didn’t turn out to be A and D in their original version online without using a capo which I don’t have. Which is why I thought maybe the app would provide these in a transposed way that I could play along with? As far as moving forward, I figured I’d do this either once I got bored and/or felt like my finger pain was not a limiting factor in playing for more than say, 10-15 minutes at a stretch.
I remember those days well. I had a goal of playing 15 minutes every day but my fingers could only take 5 minutes. So I did that 3 times a day till they toughened up.
Welcome to the forum. Look forward to hearing more from you.
I started with the A D and E strings with the anchor finger as taught by Justin. Back then (15 years ago) his beginners song book had an easy version of Blowin In the Wind using just A E and D. It’s no longer in that song book but if you send me a personal message I’ll shoot you a copy of that arrangement.
Hi Levi, welcome to the community. I would move on to module 2 so that you can learn the E chord and open up a world of songs you can play. If you go to the Song Lessons and use the Chord menu choice to select songs with the A and D chords I get 10 song lessons. Selecting A, D and E chords gives you a LOT of songs
On Justin’s site, select Songs, where you can find songs only with the A and D chords. You do this by selecting “Chords” on the left and then selecting A and D. You should get about 10 songs showing up. (Whether you are familiar with them is another matter
Not many songs have only 2 chords, but many have only 3. So once you learn the E chord, you can select A, D and E and you will have around 50 songs to choose from.
EDIT: Oops, I just noticed that @SteveL_G99 had already posted these suggestions. Anyway, I concur!
Hello Reston.
Welcome to JustinGuitar and this fantastic community.
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Wow, it sounds like you guys have a ton of resources, so thank you for all the info! Just about 2 weeks in and about to start module 3 of the beginner course, so very early days. Just to the point where my fingers aren’t killing me after 5 minutes of playing, lol! I’ll be sure to look up all those resources as I get further along and/or hit any bumps needing additional help!
A warm welcome to our Community Levi. As others have said when you add just the E chord a whole world of songs will open up! But you’re really just at the beginning and finding out things…
A song entirely D to A all the way through you might be familiar with is the children 'song Five Little Ducks, not sure though it’s among your favourites
