Guitar Lesson 7/11/2016

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 learn about keys and scales and to know our instruments better really. The one scale we all did know however was the pentatonic but we only knew one shape so our teacher taught us a trick to find the pentatonic of A higher up the fretboard. I found it quite confusing because we had to remember a pattern with our fingers rather than the fret number, which is what I'm used to remembering because of tabs. But since it is a pentatonic, I figured out that I can count to 5 and start again, so that made it a lot simpler for me.

Over the next week I am going to practise this way of playing the A pentatonic scale and maybe even try to improvise over a backing track with it. I could record myself playing some chords in A and when I play it back I will improv over it and hopefully this will improve my memory. It will also improve my speed of playing the scale and make me more confident improvising in A.

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