Short practise

I just had my next short practise, as I am a bit short on time lately. However, I really want to keep my discipline in playing and learning to master the guitar!!

I continued with warming up a bit, repeating the song I learned and then some of the chords I played at the start of the classes. I still remember pretty much of this and am glad to have written down everything, so I can look it up at all times.

I was at a great concert last Friday (Qua Paso was the name of the band) and there were two guys playing really great guitar. We had seats at the front of the stage, so I really took my chance there studying how they played. What I noticed mostly, is that they used a lot of: BAR CHORDS!!

Just what I have been studying lately and so far definitely the hardest part. For the simple fact that fingers need to be spread wide while maintaining pressure on the strings...so this hurts a bit and I need to think all the time how to move my fingers along the strings for the next bar chords. Really great to see this band playing and to get the inspiration for this dificult topic.

And of course, there is always the video available, where Master Ben explains how to play these bar chords in a simple and effective way. What helps also is that the sound of bar chords is really nice. The normal (open) chords do not sound so great on my guitar (BC Rich, basic model), but the bar chords have a realy nice sound. Up for the next practise!!

Interesting class..

Back again, as I didn't have much time to play recently unfortunately. It looks like now I will have some more time, so I really want to get some more practise again this week.

I started today with the class on Bar Chords, as I did not want to go back classes that I covered already before. This specific part is for me a bit more complicated to grasp. That is why it is so useful to have the video's at hand all the time, because Master Ben really demonstrates everything that could possibly cause confusion.

For example, how to position your hand on the neck of the guitar, how to bend your wrist, how to spread your fingers, how far your wrist should go and how to hook in the guitar to your upper body basically. Really useful, next to the obvious and clear explanations. I watched the 6th video , which is longer as mentioned in my previous blog. It will take me some time to master this technique, as I find it hard to AND use my first finger to cover some fret which is more than 1 fret away from my 3/4th fingers. Needs some time...

Especially in the beginning of the neck, where the frets are wide apart, this is not so easy. The last part of the neck is really OK, though. I need to practise my hand position, and this is again where it comes in to be very useful to have Master Ben's video at hand. With this tool you can really see how an experienced guitarist handles this and sets himself up!