Guitar lesson 21/11/2016

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 wires can break equipment and disrupt performances or practises as well as potentially hurting yourself. Furthermore water around electricity can have the same consequences but in a more dangerous way, e.g fires can occur. Heavy lifting again could be a combination of both as dropping equipment can break it but you can also hurt yourself - not ideal if you're about to play a gig.

Secondly we went over the A minor pentatonic scale from previous lessons but again we built on it. Last week I practised the A minor scale tricks we were taught and now I can almost confidently play it going up and back down the neck, which is an improvement. Before I found it quite complicated but by counting every 5 notes I have almost managed to get it down. Today however, we looked at the G minor pentatonic in 5 different patterns. This was more advanced and did confuse me again but with practise at home I am confident I can get it. Because our collective goal is to be able to improvise in more scales, we practised figuring our the relative minors of keys and then soloing in them, including C minor and Eb. I liked this because we had to find the root notes of the scale which helps with our other goal of learning where all the notes are on the fretboard. My only setback was that I'm not sure how to work out the relative minor or major of a key so at home I plan to revise this each night until I can recall them off by heart.

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Our third activity of the lesson was triads. I have seen triads frequently in songs but today I learned how to construct major and minor ones and some inversion shapes on the fretboard. Again this helped with learning notes because to figure out a triad we had to find a root note. This led to me realising that triads are really the top part of a barre chord but as I have been so used to 3 barre chord shapes (two major forms and a minor one) I have never noticed. In our funk band, we are playing Can't Stop by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the bridge includes four triads that are played off beat. We started off by finding triads for the chorus chords - G, D, Bm and C which I usually play as barre chords and Chris plays as open chords - and I had the idea of incorporating triads in to the chorus as well. With us both strumming big chords in the chorus I feel it sounds very bulky and deep because we have so many low notes ringing out but by playing syncopated triads I think we can match the style of funk more accurately. It will also split our two guitars up more so that the performance has more depth to it and deter the song away from the rocky feel. Furthermore, the triads are not included in the original recording so by adding them we have put our own spin on to the song. Therefore in our rehearsal lesson on Wednesday I want to practise these triads over the chords to make the song more interesting to listen to. Prior to that however, I will figure out a syncopated rhythm at home and practise it along to the recording.

This is the chart we used to work out triads:

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Finally, we looked at 7th chords. We learned the chords to I Want You Back by The Jackson 5; we all picked them up pretty quickly because we instinctively went for barre chords. Our task was to switch the Ab, Db and Bbm chords to 7ths by using a chord chart. This would give the song a more bluesy feel. I figured the changes out easily but actually making them on the fretboard was more difficult because my hands are so adapted to playing barre chords. However, with a little more practise at home I think I will be able to pick them up. As an extension I could listen to other songs and work out the 7th chords for them.

This was the chord chart we used to figure out the 7th chords:

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Overall I think today was our most successful guitar lesson as I learned a lot. I really enjoyed it!


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