Kim Richardson - Guitar

Today our lesson was highly technical and required a lot of thinking. I enjoyed it! To start, we recapped over health and safety but thought about it in a lot more detail. We distinguished between environmental and physiological hazards when playing guitar. Physiological hazards included repetitive strain injury, hydration and posture. Repetitive strain injury can damage your wrist in the long term so it is important to have good technique and to not play for hours on end each day. Similarly, posture is important because playing in a slouched position and damage your back and can prevent you from playing longer, better shows. Hydration is crucial to keep your mind fresh in rehearsals and on stage, since both settings can become super warm. Dehydration can hinder your concentration too, which could lead to making mistakes or even fainting, at the most extreme. For environmental hazards, we identified tripping over wires, water around electricity and heavy lifting. Tripping over wire...

Today in our guitar lesson we practiced our warm ups, including our A minor pentatonic. We discussed maintenance again and Kyle changed a string since he wasn't here last week. We talked about what we are planning to do in our video assessment. For mine I would like to change one of my strings to demonstrate that I can do it successfully and I will clean off my fretboard with lemon oil. I might also talk about how you shouldn't use lemon oil on a maple neck to show my understanding of different guitar woods. I will talk about my guitar's truss rod, how and why you adjust it and how important it is to be careful because your guitar is ruined if you break the truss rod. When I've changed my string and tuned it up I will demonstrate some of the warm-up techniques we have been practicing in these lessons. I will probably demonstrate my favourite ones and the ones that I feel have helped me the most. My preferred warm ups are the chromatic scales where you move back a fret...

We began the lesson by re-capping about warm ups and health safety. In the last week I have hurt myself on string ends twice so in terms of health and safety this is something I need to watch. Cutting string ends as short as I can is something I need to remember to do. One of the main activities for today's lesson was guitar maintenance so we each changed a string on either Tom's or Mia's guitars. I found this task easy since I change guitar strings as part of my weekend job. I was glad to be able to help my classmates who had only ever changed their strings a couple of times. The second activity was discussing our personal goals for these guitar lessons and the most common goal was learning the fretboard off by heart. The most common way to learn guitar now is by videos and tabs on the internet but a lot of online teachers miss out the theory parts to playing guitar, which is the downside to not having proper lessons. Because of this, our main goal as a group is to lea...