A plan for learning guitar
I’ve been playing guitar for coming up 8 years now and I thought I’d write a blog about the process of learning guitar. When I was first learning guitar at school along with friends of mine, I found that we all had completely different goals, methods and standards for learning and playing guitar. It was interesting to see that, while each guitarist’s approach to learning guitar was different, we were all around the same level by the time we left school.
However, many people didn’t manage to reach the standards they aspired to when they first started playing. This was down to a number of different reasons: some became bored with playing, some reached what they believed was the limit of their abilities while others just loved playing the same music and didn’t want to learn new material. After reading or watching interviews of my guitar heroes over the years I’ve noticed that all of them have plenty of talent and a drive to improve, but mainly they have the following:-
A good work ethic, free time and enjoyment.
A good work ethic is important to allow you to withstand the monotony of simple exercises, which despite being boring, can help you build up muscle memory and give you the foundation to learn more tricky stuff in the future. Concentrating on a simple task can be hard work; it’s easier and more fun to just play something you know, but it’s difficult to improve further than a certain level by that method.
Some of the best guitarists would have you believe that they were musical gods as soon as they picked a guitar up but the truth is that they all played for hours and hours on end in their bedrooms to reach the top of their game. You don’t need loads of free time to learn an instrument, but it’s useful to have some structure and play for at least an hour every day. As long as you push yourself slightly each practise you can improve every day. Even it seems like you’ve been playing something for so long that it’s getting worse, it’s building muscle memory and the next day you’ll see the improvement.
This really goes without saying, you have to enjoy yourself when playing guitar. If you enjoy what you’re playing you can sit around strumming/shredding away for hours and still want to play more. Enjoyment also makes tedious tasks more bearable allowing you to learn and play boring exercises that will help your playing in the long run. Some boring tasks like scales can be made more interesting simply by finding a song to play along to which is in the same key as the scale you’re playing.
Ear training is an important skill that passes some people by. One routine I found incredibly helpful was listening to and transcribing music to play later on. Although a fairly arduous task to start with, it helps train the ear, which in turn helps when playing in a group and perform anything improvised. You can start ear training by simply trying to tune your guitar with your ear, then checking it with a tuner afterwards. It is an essential skill for any musician which builds the foundation for improvement later on.
It’s worth learning as much about music theory as you can when learning guitar. Theory can give bring a new dimension of understanding to playing an instrument and speeds up the learning process. A good knowledge of music theory is essential for songwriting. Knowing how chords and different notes interact with eachother over the course of a song means that less time is spent working the music out and more time actually writing the music.
So, if you’re learning guitar then you might want to encorporate some of the above points into your playing to see if any of it helps. As I said to start with, people learn by very different methods so do whatever works for you.
I’ll stick some exercises up on the blog at some point but my music is online if you fancy having a listen. Feel free to drop some comments on the blog or send me an email!
Rich Williams
The origins of the English language
English is a diverse and ever-changing language which is now widely seen as the international language. This, of course, wasn’t always the case. To start with there was the expansion of the British Empire which saw Britain colonising a large portion of the world’s population starting back in the 16th Century. Since then the empire has grown and then waned while America’s power has increased, promoting the language even more.
But even though most people speak English, the majority of them don’t take any time to think about the origins of words or why we use them in a particular context.
The language you speak will have evolved even since you were born. Words like internet, intranet, gigabyte obviously weren’t around until around 20 years ago as well as others spawned in the last century as a result of technological breakthroughs (television, computer, etc). The origins of recent words are generally obvious (‘tele’, greek root meaning ‘far’ + ‘vision’ (sight) = television, likewise with telephone) but some older words have deeper roots.
Some words have either died out or been transformed by the influence of other european languages and dialects but there are a few that remain unchanged to this day. Old English words like swift, seek, midst, shall are all Old English words that have survived a millenium of human history unchanged and others such as draught and wit are still used but in a slightly different context (‘wit’ used to mean know – the connection between the old meaning and new meaning is evident).
The latin influence came about when the roman empire turned up but also from the Norman Invasion which brought along Old French (also influenced by latin). Some latin words that we still use in everyday English are via, item, per, sponsor, census, ultra, agenda. These words often have the same or similar spelling in Spanish, French and Italian, three languages which are heavily influenced by Latin. Per favore and por favor, meaning ‘please’ in Italian and Spanish respectively show the similarity between these two languages. Long words that need translation from English to Spanish or French are often a blessing because they are quite specific and thus have the same Latin root. Most words ending with -ation can be translated letter for letter into French with the addition of a few accents, likewise with Spanish after changing the -ation to -acíon. Communication, contraction, complication, irritation, interrogation and association are identical in French and go to comunicacíon, contracción, complicación, irritación, interrogación y asociación in Spanish (a feature of Spanish is that only Ls, Rs and Cs can be used in pairs, so association loses an s to become asociacíon).
Another major influence to Old English was Old Norse which was introduced by the invading Vikings. This brought many new words and modified existing vocabulary. Words like hand, arm, finger are all the same or similar in germanic and scandanavian languages and the word ‘dog’ changes to ‘hund’ – which is where we get ‘hound’. Place names were influenced in this manner; Norfolk for instance, ‘Nor’ meaning ‘north or northern’ and ‘folk’ meaning ‘of the people’ is a result of the Nordic influence.
So there you go, without realising it most of us have been speaking words which have hundreds and in some cases thousands of years of history which makes you wonder if it would be possible to understand or even hold a conversation with an Old English speaker from 400 A.D.
Probably not but it might be amusing.
Rich Williams
Twenty Twenty Cricket
For those who hate cricket, don’t switch off just yet. Even if you think it’s the most boring game in the world and you don’t have the patience to watch more than 5 minutes of play, i still think cricket can appeal to you.
My reasoning behind this bold statement is that the game has finally broken off into different formats, and one of these formats is designed purely to entertain the spectators over a short period of time, with explosive batting, relentless pace and a bit of music and dancing here and there. I’m talking, if you don’t know already, about Twenty Twenty Cricket.
Twenty Twenty Cricket is a snazzy name for 20 over cricket and is geared towards entertainment of the masses rather than pleasing tactically minded old men with bushy moustaches and the compulsion to yell “bloody good show” every couple of minutes. The scores in a 20 over game can rise up to over 200 runs on a good batting pitch, where a batsman has to hit at least 2 or 3 boundaries (hit it down to the rope that encircles the entire ground) each over to win the game. There are no drawn games in 20 20 cricket except for tying on the same score on the last ball of the match, which happens more often than you would’ve thought possible.
There are fielding restrictions for the first five overs of the game meaning almost all fielders have to stand no more than 30 yards away from the batsman, giving them the opportunity to hit over the top easily. This encourages the players to clobber the ball as hard as they can, resulting in some huge hits. Yuvraj Singh, an Indian batsman, hit Stuart Broad for six sixes in one six ball over in the 20 20 world cup as well as securing one of the biggest hits recorded (117 metres) which, needless to say, ended up out of the ground and in somebody’s garden down the road.
All the excitement over Twenty Twenty cricket culminated in a game for 20 million US dollars put up by Sir Allen Stanford which had the England team play the Stanford Superstars, basically the West-Indian team. Although the game was an anti-climax with England being comprehensively beaten by the Superstars, the ground was packed, the crowd were cheering and those who weren’t were either dancing or playing some sort of musical instrument.
So, in conclusion, even if you think you hate the game because your dad watched it when you were younger and it you found it mind-numbingly boring, or even if you don’t understand it, it’s certainly worth watching a Twenty Twenty match.
Rich Williams
Doing my first blog
Right then…
I have no idea what i’m doing with this thing, but… I will work out what i’m doing eventually and post some blogs about some random topics i’m interested in, which just about covers everything with the exception of beard growing, DIY and vegetarian food.
Keep an eye on this blog though, good things will come over time.
