zephie's journals
i'd rather not look up when i got this guitar, nor all the other times i tried to learn to play it then quickly fell off. my biggest setback was that i always focused on working my wingers (that's wing fingers) to be guitarable first, which was a long and slow process i mostly didn't want to move on from until i was capable of playing for more than 10 minutes without getting super-ouchies. problem was i was too inconsistent in working at it that i never got to a comfortably guitarable state. looking back i don't know at what point i would've decided i was ready to move on, i was just lazy
writing these stupid little journals on my dumb idiot website has been really fun so i thought i should finally use it in helping me do something worthwhile rather than play video games. i used to journal things like these for the sake of accountability, e.g. "today i practiced thing for x minutes. end", but that's boring to look back on, and also it was an OCD nightmare. i bought a cheap $10 microphone to record myself which i'm real excited/scared about. audio quality to match the playing quality; after a couple weeks i hope to move onto a $12 microphone
i re-recorded this a few times and i don't know why. suddenly worried about when i'll be recording things for the sake of showing where i'm at and i'll obsess over getting the perfect clip
i've wondered about keeping a general music journal instead of only guitar, because i want to incorporate theory training as well. i used to have a digital piano i originally tried learning to play but after a while only used for studying theory, for which it was pretty overkill. now i'd just want a lil midi guy on my desk to mess around with. but i'll see what happens.....
i'm currently going through the first beginner course on justinguitar.com. again i don't want to know how many times i've rewatched the first set of videos on there. i've made it to practicing A, D and E chords which is currently how i'm very sloppily trying to guitarify my wingers (wing fingers) while i brush up on the more boring lessons about posture or whatever. well i say that but more often i find myself just passively trying to bully them by haphazardly running them across the strings. have to keep in mind it's possible to work at getting guitarable and practice guitar at the same time
there is the issue of just not knowing if my guitar is actually good enough. i've read most guitars will require some kind of setup to sound right, which i'd imagine would be especially true for my cheapo guitar i bought after searching "beginner guitar" and seeing one in my price range, figuring quality wouldn't matter too much if i'm just focusing on learning for now. but maybe it does! i don't know. i've noticed at least that one of the strings does sound especially fuzzy....i guess it'd be worth taking it into a shop at some point to get it checked out
remembering i can practice multiple times a day if i space it out.. i was working on switching between A and D chords which, especially the A i remember seeming impossible for a while a long time ago. i'm super ready to get up to stuff that's entirely new to me and be reminded of how hard they are at first, and how hard my wingers that's wing fingers are not. felt like the ouchies came on quicker today
keeping all my guitarstuff on/next to my desk to make it easy to impulsively pick up and play whenever i'm not too oof owie. that was my excuse for not playing piano most of the time, that setting it up was a hassle. even though my apartment is a tiny studio and pretty much everything is "next to" my desk
making a conscious effort not to feel the need to write here every day. have a bad habit of trying to "prove" to myself that i've done things, instead of focusing on seeing the results of those things. it's probably worse at first because i can't play for very long each day without the pain hitting, so overall progress is slower
have a feeling the only things i'll be posting for the next month are progressively slightly cleaner and/or faster versions of this
i also have a bad habit of waiting until too late in the day to start any Bigger Practice, or anything more involved than kind of passively playing the same two chords while watching TV. i have a mostly late schedule so i get too worried to keep playing and making noise at night, especially when i have a neighbor who comes to complain about the sound of my vacuum. i started using a daily structured practice tool on justinguitar.com today, but ran into technical issues with the videos on there that i need to finish a routine, and now i've spent too long troubleshooting
maybe for the best that i get in an extra day of strengthening, because the routine involves a straight ten minutes of playing that i still don't know if i can do in one go. choosing to believe that's the reason i still cannot get a good sounding A-string on the A-major; i just can't press down hard enough. i was expecting to do the routine once and immediately be past the point at which it says to move on, since i've gone through this module of lessons a couple times in the past. but the wingerstrength does not carry over
also i'm learning that the reason a lot of famous guitarists can have their long flowy hair is probably because they do not have to constantly be hunching over to look at what strings they're hitting. this stuff is all extremely up in my face
today i learned that if i want to consistently post recordings to show my progress i should make them before i've exhausted all playing strength. that ten-minute routine got me in acheworld!! surprisingly not far into soresville though. i had to take several breaks. the aching could very likely be due to poor technique but part of me wants to believe that it's normal and i can simply power through it to become wingjacked. the lessons did say something about that, and purposely employing less-than-optimal technique at the beginning for the sake of building strength
i paid for the theory course on this site and started going through that as well, mostly out of impatience during my babyphase. i've bounced around a few different theory courses in the past back when i had a piano, but i wanted to go with a guitar-focused one. i don't know how much that matters, probably not much, but i also have a bad habit of spending too much time studying how to study something instead of studying it. there was a course right there on the same site so that's what i'm using fight me about it but later please i'm still weak from playing guitar
i've contacted a guitar workshop nearby to ask if they'll take a look at my little man. their website said they offer a "learner guitar setup" for no-name babyguitars, so i just want to make sure nothing's horribly wrong with mine that i'd have no idea to look for. anything to get me to stop worrying that all the buzzies might actually be the guitar's fault and not mine. i promise i'll react normally when faced with the hard truth that my playing is in fact fallible after all
i did find a video of a guitarist from DragonForce reviewing the guitar i have saying it's good, which along with having a setup done would definitely alleviate any worries i have. what confused me though is that in the video he was playing it crazy good and fast yet i can't do that ?? it's the same guitar so it makes no sense.. i'm sure the workshop service will fix whatever the deal is with that. also found a video he did on the tiny amp that comes with it
i tried using it again today but i just can't get it sounding good. i am met with much worse, albeit different buzzies, which could very well be the cable, or interference or a whole lot of other things i'm not going to bother looking into at this point. then i remembered i had a cable for Rocksmith lying around (which i just learned they took down to force people to use their new subscription service with a fraction of the songs booo!!), and that maybe i could use that to put da guitar on da computer
sounds a lot better than i could get with the amp! i just plugged it into FL Studio and again, that's another whole thing i'm not gonna get into right now; figuring out all the intricacies of how to make that sound better. though it does almost make me wanna practice on there instead of acoustically, but i might pick up some bad habits since it lessens the buzzies