In keeping with my plan to learn a song a week, I chose to learn Ain’t no Sunshine by Bill Withers this week. The original is fairly easy to play on guitar and didn’t really make me learn much, even though it sounds cool, so I decided to transpose it down a tone to G minor so I can practice my ‘new’ chords that I didn’t know before starting this semester, being G minor and C minor.

When I was practicing it this week, I found that even though there are no new chords I actually found it more challenging than most weeks since the last time I had to play G minor and C minor was in week 2 of the practice blog, and I had never played them before then.

To be honest, I wasn’t overly happy with the result of this weeks work. I don’t think the singing sounded particularly good with it and because I’m not overly familiar with the song I found pitching it to be hard. Obviously, seeing as I’m learning guitar not singing that isn’t the focus but even with the guitar playing I found it very hard to make smooth chord shifts between these unfamiliar feeling chords and frequently made small mistakes. In saying this, I learnt much more this week because I was challenged then the last few weeks so I think overall it was a succesful week, even if I’m not 100% happy with the end result.

This week I decided to try my hand at Father and Son by Cat Stevens to practice what I already know, and to learn A minor 7. The chord chart I was reading off used B minor occasionally, however it seemed to be where D Major was used in other verses so I substituted D Major for B minor when it came up so I would be able to practice what was needed for KAME.

When I was practicing this song I realised that in the original there is a brief fingerstyle part that I never noticed, because it seems to be arpegiated chords. Since I am only one guitarist and I can’t play both parts at once I decided to briefly switch to the fingerstyle part when needed to practice my arpegios. It does mean there is a brief moment when the texture drastically thins out but I think in the spirit of staying true to the original it should be added into my arrangement.

I was very happy with the result of last weeks practice and how much better I know those chords now, so I decided I want to continue with the same strategy as last week, this week with the last frontier by Redgum. I grew up with this song so I know it very well and I have always thought that it carried emotional weight that would make it a nice campfire song, so I tried to arrange it this week to sound like that.

The original key contains B minor, which I thought I could learn just for this song but seeing as it isn’t a required chord I thought it better to transpose it down a tone and use a capo. This song now contains Bb Majors and F’s so I thought it was a good chance to practice these harder chords, and it also has C7 so I thought it was a good chance to learn that.

When I was learning this song I noticed the violin part did some nice embelishments in the original, and I tried to create some of my own playing only one note at a time that I could edit in after to make it sound more complete. I realised after I wrote these moving parts however that they all either played a note already being played by the chord or just played an open string so I decided to try play these with the chordal part. It took a while to get the coordination down but once I did I found it a very useful excersise in selectively strumming strings on the guitar whilst the others rang out from a previous chord.

After learning all the needed major and minor chords, I think I have enough knowledge to try my hand at most songs. Even the ones that have some kind of 7th, sus 4 or 9th chord should only have one or two types of them in a song so my current plan for learning guitar is to test my knowledge in actual song settings.

I chose to learn country roads by John Denver this week because it introduces the D7 chord for me, and also because I’m very familiar with the song so I should be able to know when I’m wrong straight away, rather than making small mistakes and not being aware that it shouldn’t sound like that.

I am also not an overly confident singer, but so I can make my chord changes more accurate with the song and so I don’t have to always play along to a backing track I will sing along to the guitar when I learn a song. The guitar part is the one I’m actually learning tho and the vocal part is more to pull it together so it isn’t very well practiced.

When I was learning this song I also found that the suggested strumming pattern was fairly boring and didn’t sound to much like the original, so I tried to imitate the vibe of the original more and came up with my own patterns.

Setting aside the 7th chords for now, the other chords I need to learn are C Minor, F Minor, G Minor, Bb Major and Bb Minor, and I learnt these through a similar method I use to teach my 1 on 1 students how to tongue faster. The excersise traditionally is starting at a slow tempo (I used 40 bpm), play a long note for 4 beats, then 2 for 2 beats, then 4 notes for 1 beat, 8 notes for 1/2 a beat each, and you keep going until you can’t tongue faster. To learn these chords I substitued tonguing for a chord change, so it was 1 chord per 4 beats, then changing chords every 2 beats, then changing chords once a beat.

These are the chord shapes I used;

I stopped the excersise once I could comfortably play 1 chord a beat at 60 bpm and I recorded this video of the excersise once I could comfortably play these chords at that tempo.

My sister used to play guitar, and as such I have a spare guitar lying around at home that I take out and jam on from time to time, using a capo to get around tricky chords. As a result of this I already have a fundamental understanding of guitar basics, and this week I consolidated what I already know and worked out what I need to learn from now on.

This chord chart lists all the chords I need to know by the end of semester, and of these I already know C Major, D Major, E Minor, E Major, G Major, A Minor and A Major quite well, and I know what D Minor and F Major are but I’m not fluent at them yet.