Typing this hurts. Especially every letter that I hit with the fingers of my left hand. Did you know that the letter "E" is the most commonly used letter and that you type it with your left hand? I am now acutely aware of this.
I've practiced every day this week except for the one day I stayed in bed so sick that I couldn't keep water down. I'm giving myself a pass for that day and I don't even feel a little bit bad about it. Aside from that day, I've been picking up the guitar in just about every moment of free time to practice my chords and my note reading.
I'm using a very old lesson book (Deluxe Edition Guitar Self-Taught Ed Sale Radio's Wizard of the Strings c1952) and playing around on Ultimate Guitar to see if there are any songs that I can play yet using chords or tabs. The book might need some updating; maybe something newer would be better, but it's what I have on hand and it's working just fine right now.
I wouldn't say, overall, that it's going well but I'd say that there has been progress. For some reason I expected to be able to play something cool by now and have it be recognizable, with relatively quick switching between chords or notes and no real mistakes. Not anything complicated, of course, but something simple and straight-forward.
I might have been a little ahead of myself in my head. That's okay; I'm always a hopeful person. I'm able to dial that back a bit and just take victory in the little pleasures, like figuring out that to switch between an Am chord and a C chord all I have to do is move one finger, not pick up my whole hand and place it back down.
By this time next week I have three main goals:
- Be able to read all first-position notes on sight
- Feel like I have made actual improvement switching between chords (smoother, faster)
- Finish Lesson Book One (and find new book)
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