And Now; The Guitar

I hired a guitar teacher the other night. His name is John Lee. 25 year old guy who's been playing since he was 10! Amazing player, but he's not a great teacher. He's very young and has trouble explaining to me what it is he want me to do. Sometimes he's way over my head and other times he's too elementary.

Tuesday night he began teaching me "Hey Joe". Trying to get me to play 1) in time 2) with a down down down up strum pattern and 3) selectively hitting strings to make the sounds more interesting. In other words, not strumming all of the strings for the first few strums, but rather just the top ones, then the bottom o (higher pitch) ones for the last 2 strums in a measure. Also trying to get me to mute the strings a bit.

The hardest thing is keeping time, especially when I'm strumming more than one time per beat. When practicing I decided to keep it to one strum until I could keep time...then I changed to three down strums per chord so I could get a feel for the time sequence.

Fingers hurt, especially the pointer and middle finger. Ran them under hot water this morning and just about screamed.

Gonna hurt worse soon because I plan on sticking with 1 hour of practice a night.