Only What I Know: I know learning guitar is a process.

Process and Challenges

My classes have not started yet, though I have signed up for a yahoo group for guitar enthusiasts in Seattle. I wouldn’t meet until I get much better, however. I don’t want to be bad at guitar in person. To get up on the basics I am mostly using the book. The book indicates that the player’s fingers go around the neck of the guitar for many to most of the chords. I look at finger placement in the book and try to do what I see. Sometimes my fingers are just not long enough for the proper placement. Other times it takes a little more finger dexterity than I’ve got at the moment.

I looked to Google images for other ways of visualizing finger placement, to get at the ideas from another angle. I also went to YouTube for instruction on pick selection, timing/rhythm of strumming, and how to tune the guitar. I don’t have a physical tuner and my guitar is out of tune. I downloaded and tried out Yousician but my guitar is simply too out of tune right now for the app to pass me on to its skill building section. I’ll have to get a tuner or try out the online tuners. That’s the next big step, I’d say.

Goals and Accomplishments

So after one week I’m not surf guitar legend Dick Dale yet. I can strum. I like the sound it makes. I can’t yet play Dick Dale’s Misirlou, the theme song to Pulp Fiction, but I’ve got a basic understanding now of hand position, finger placement, strumming, timing, half and quarter notes and, more importantly, how to get more information/help when I get stuck, which I can tell is going to happen an awful lot between where I am now and Dick Dale. Since I can’t do Misirlou just yet, I went to Amazon for some songs I could conceivably play in the foreseeable future.

Guitar and Participatory Learning

As a teacher who wants to know how to teach students how to learn anything in the information age, this experiment in learning guitar has got me in a reflective mood, and feeling hopeful, too. I see now that every problem is just a good search away from its solution. (And a little patience for the trial and error process to unfold.) The key to a good search, it seems, is knowing the search engine, how it works, what search terms it uses, etc., and how to ask a good question, one that is directly relevant to the problem I’m looking to solve. Once I know the engine and how to turn my question into a query that the engine recognizes, it is just a matter of selecting which of the proposed solutions to try out first!