This is one of those “duh” things we all run into. I’ve been struggling with understanding guitar. Not that’s is insanely different than banjo, but for some reason my brain kept telling me “guitar is harder, you have to approach it differently”. So, I’ve been hammering away at trying to get chords down, and not really understanding why chords are chords, and chord shapes, blah blah blah.
In between beating myself up about “not getting guitar”, I’ve been downloading songs and trying to play them. I found a bunch of beginner Christmas songs and they all sounded like you’d expect. Granted, I’m slow, but speed doesn’t faze me anymore.
So I downloaded “Sounds of Silence” from MusicNotes.com today, and was playing it for the fourth or fifth time, when it hit why it was so easy to play for a beginner like me…
I knew the chords! These were shapes my hand knew how to make! Nothing was unfamiliar, except having a capo in the way, but the G chord was the G chord, the C chord was the C chord…
Somehow through just blind repetition of something I didn’t fully understand, I learned stuff.
Who knew? Oh yeah… every teacher of music out there, I suppose that’s who… and any student that’s gotten past the first few months.
Today’s a good day. I recognized that I’ve been learning all along and just didn’t know it. YAY!