This is the last post of my blog for this semester, and as such I thought I would just review all I know and go through that chord chart of the necessary chords one more time and play through each chord.

I found it incredibly hard to play the 7th chords in isolation as I couldn’t remember what they were for any of them. However, when put in a chord progression I found them to flow pretty easily as that is how I learnt them. So, for this weeks final recording I just demonstrated the major and minor chords and the 7th chords I ommited, as I can’t make a chord progression for every single one of those 7th chords and record them.

I’m almost at the end of this semester, so I think it’s time just to polish up what I don’t know so I can be ready for the assesment. I know all the major and minor chords now, and as a result of learning a song a week I have learnt most of the 7th chords, but I still haven’t learnt Cm7, Dm7, E7, Fm7, G7, Gm7, A7, Bb7 or Bbm7. I just took the same approach as when I learnt the other major and minor chords that I don’t know to learn these.

As the name of this weeks post suggests, today in KAME we were wrapping up the course with some usefull tips and tricks for playing our instruments, and one of these came in the form of very useful chord shapes. Basically, if you keep the top 2 fingers down from the G chord and play an E, D, A or C chord underneath then you get an Em7, Dsus4, A7sus4 and Cadd9 respectively. This is super useful for spicing up some chord progressions that just do the same thing over and over again because these shapes are all really easy to play (I didn’t even have to practice them, I just remembered them from after class) and they sound really nice.

In KAME today we did a battle of the bands thing, where we split into 2 groups and made our own 4 chord song, based off the 4 chord song by Axis of Awesome. Aside from it being really enjoyable, I think it was extremely useful as an excersise to do with a high school class when I actually become a teacher as it was a really good way to hammer in those 4 chords over and over again without being boring.

I was reminded by this of a medley I found a while back by Yuri Menna, a french musician, where he uses these same 4 chords over and over again to play some songs in a medley, and I decided I would play this medley this week. The reason I chose this over the Axis of Awesome 4 chords song is I’m not that familiar with all the songs in that version and it gets super high, and I can’t be buggered to sing stuff like take on me because my voice isn’t anywhere near that high. I also like the songs in this medley quite a lot.

It is of note, however, that I couldn’t play it without occasionaly stuttering or screwing up the time from having to change tabs for lyrics so I couldn’t do a perfect recording but I gave it my best shot.

I love watching Paul Davids’ videos on his guitar playing, and ages back I saw this video of his called “Turn those same old chords into something beautiful” where he basically arpegiated chords and added a melody, but it sounded really good. I figured as the semester is drawing to a close and I’m fairly confident with my chord playing ability now, I would try my hand at this style of guitar, rather than just normal strumming, for a bit of fun.

I found this extremely challenging, and whilst I tried hard to be as even as possible there were a few times where my quavers were uneven. I also found the only way to learn it was to largely memorise it so I could stare at my left hand whilst I played. Overall tho, I was quite happy with how I played seeing as I’ve never tried anything like this before.

This was a big week for me, as this week I decided to serve a mission for the next 2 years (aslong as it can be worked out logistically so I can be back for uni in 2022), and as such I figured that I wanted to do a piece that fit this idea this week. I chose the last goodbye by Billy Boyd from the hobbit movies as this piece to learn.

Whilst I didn’t chose this piece to learn anything new, an added bonus of choosing to learn this piece is that I learn the Dsus4 chord, which isn’t specifically required from the course but is a really nice sounding chord in my opinion so I think I will use it to colour other pieces with a D chord in it.

I don’t know if it is a testament to how much I have learnt or if the piece is rather simple but I found the piece fairly easy to play this week, with the Dsus4 chord being super simple to add in as it flowed very nicely from the C chord if I kept the G held down from the G chord into the C chord then into the D chord. The one issue I did have was with pitching the singing. I have no idea why but I really struggled in some bits to pitch the right note. I think if I spent more time focussing on the vocals it would have been ok but since that isn’t necesarry for the KAME course it’s something I want to focus on after semester is over, as I really like this song and would like to be able to both play it well and sing it well.

A couple of weeks ago I did the last frontier by Redgum, and I decided I would play another one of their songs this week, a more upbeat song called Long Run. This song didn’t really teach me anything new, but I’m at the point now where I’m fairly comfortable with what I know, I just need to hammer in the ability to change chords quickly and practice my general playing.

I also tried to focus on my strumming this week, because this is song is really simple with its chords so I figured I had to create the drive and intensity of the song with interesting and strong strumming patterns. I would write down a strumming pattern I came up with, but to be honest I more or less vibed it as I was practicing it and used trial and error mid song to get a nice groove.

When I was finding the new songs last week I also stumbled on this recording of Shotgun, originaly by George Ezra but this version was done by Luke James Shaffer

I thought this version sounded pretty cool and the concept of trying to make my own loops was intriguing so I thought I would try to recreate his cover of shotgun. I don’t have a looper so I recorded each ‘loop’ in audacity with a metronome going then coppied and pasted in on repeat. I also wanted to practice playing individual lines, which isn’t part of the assesment but sounds cool on guitar and I thought this would be a good way to do it.

I started learning this with a free program called ‘Ambiloop’ and it was working a charm. I made a great loop version. Then it came to recording it with audacity and artificially making loops and it all went out the window. It turns out that when each loop is a fraction of a second off it doesn’t matter with an actual looper because it always starts together, but when it comes to copying and pasting over the length of a couple of minutes these inconsistencies become really obvious. My solution to this was just to record a normal cover of shotgun for this blog and to know that the loop cover I did worked pretty well for fun. I definitely want to buy a looper after this and see what I can do with it for my actual compositions because this week showed me there is heaps of potential to looping if done well.

I was going down the rabbit hole that is youtube this week, in my attempts to find music to listen to, and I stumbled accross this recording of hearts on fire by Passenger, sung with Ed Sheeran.

I’ve always liked the song when it is sung by only passenger but I forgot about it for years, until I saw this and it made me want to play it for my song this week. It is very repetative which should make learning the new Cadd9 chord required by the piece fairly straightforward.

After I wrote the beginning of this post, I started to learn the song and it turns out the original is transposed down a semitone, and I wanted to stay true to the original, so I had 3 options. Option 1, add a capo on fret 11 which is a fairly bad option as it would be way to high a capo and my hands would have to wrap around the body of the guitar. Option 2 is to place a capo on fret 6 and play in C instead of G, which would be a good option if I didn’t want to learn Cadd9 (the substitute would be Fadd9 and I like the sound of Cadd9 much more and it would be more common with most songs). Option 3 is to tune all the strings down a semitone and play what I was already going to (the chords from the duet not the original) and seeing as 1 semitone isn’t that much, and it’s not something I would normally do I figured I would go with option 3. I also thought it would be interesting to see if the timbre of the guitar would be altered from it being detuned slightly lower.

In high school, I was part of a Ska ensemble that a few of my friends and a teacher I quite liked started. I played bari sax and because of the low difficulty of ska music (for the horn section atleast) I often spent the time that the rhythm section used to rehearse their little bits to arrange songs for the band to play. One such song was days like this and after the teacher heard it, Days like this became our closing song in any concert we did. Thus, I decided that I would learn days like this, even though it is a fairly simple song to play the chords for.

To compensate for the relatively straightforward chords I added C7, Am7 and F7 every now and then to spice up the chords. The song is also sung fairly high so I didn’t sing it particularly well but I don’t really mind because I’m playing the song for fun and to practice guitar, not to perform it.