Touching Base
I just wanted to touch base on a couple things. A good friend of mine who plays guitar in a band stopped out. He plays a pretty mean guitar. Believe or not, he can not read music. I could hardly believe it! His explanation was that he plays the cowboy chord method. In guitar instructor speak it means that he is chording on the first five to six frets of stings, also known as first position on the guitar.
He plays so much, a luthier redressed and rebuilt up some of the frets on the neck of the guitar, but only on the first half dozen or so. Speaking to another guitar friend of mine, I found out that there are a lot of guitarists like this because they are more interested in making music than music theory, and they sound great!
It certainly gave me a different perspective of how many guitarists are playing guitar through the use of standard chord patterns and common progressions. One progression is called the 1,4,5. That means if A is one cord you count up to the 4th and 5th cord which are D and E. For those not familiar with the music theory chords and notes run ABCDEFGABCDEFG. So, pick one chord and count up to the 4th and 5th cord and you have most of the chords for many songs already figured out.
With playing the piano, I never thought about chord progressions in this manner. It is also one of the things I really am starting to recognize in many of the guitar learning software products. What was also interesting is how some of the same chord patterns are used, but with different rhythm to create entirely separate songs like the two songs; Louie, Louie and Wild Thing. I’ll try to post to explain these while I am still getting my guitar learning software tips together.
My personal feeling is that you can be a cowboy chord, Kumbiyah or campfire guitar player and still have a great time with it. In fact, many bands have multiple guitars where one guitarist is really good and can play in many positions, which when combined with your basic first position player, we have been talking about, gives the bands that full sound we are used to hearing. Playing the same chords on the guitars in different positions played at the same time is awesome.
On a final note, I took my Martin guitar to Larry at Strings on Broadway to see what he could tweak. Don’t get me wrong, the Martin Guitar I have is fantastic. It is an orchestra model with a cutaway. My wife still doesn’t really know how much I paid for it. But in the upper positions near the bottom of the neck, the strings always seemed a bit high and hard to grab. What a difference! The strings were soft like butter, almost like an electric. That guitar went from fantastic to marvelous.
I do believe the more you love your guitar, the more you will want to play.
