Hi Ronan!

Here’s what to focus on this week. Spend a minimum of 15 minutes doing each of these things a day. — Remember to rest and to stretch in the ways described in my last week’s homework notes.

  • Also: If you spend a day just working on one of these things for 15 minutes, that’s fine too. That counts towards your progress on your instrument.

Posture

Here is the order of things to pay attention to when positioning yourself in good guitar posture.

  • Sit down with your body slightly slanted; that is, your knees pointing left
  • Put the guitar with the body on your right thigh
  • Have the guitar head pushed somewhat forward from your left side — The idea here: have your wrists as straight and as free as possible to be able to move around and play things with plenty of space for both arms to do so

It’s fine to tilt the guitar body onto yourself & check where your LH fingers must go. But then tilt it back upright.

  • Keep the LH fingers nice and curled. That shape is stronger than straight fingers
  • Have your LH thumb go close to your LH fingers holding down frets; as if there was a rod going through your guitar between the thumb and the fingers — This, too, will ensure that you can hold the frets down strongly

G chord from last time

We looked at this chord a little bit today, too. Keep trying to hold it properly and strum only the top 4 strings. — Remember, we speak upside down in guitar; High E string means closer to the floor but higher in pitch.

Em chord

  • Based on the previous diagram, you can infer what exactly is meant by this one
  • The numbers there are the LH fingerings
  • The white dots are the open strings
  • So: Hit all 6 strings for this one :)

Try the E chord too — bonus challenge

  • You struck this chord pretty nicely in class today
  • Though I think holding down these frets and playing them properly every single time might be a super big challenge right now. So this I’m not going to be strict about you getting this chord right
  • Hit all 6 strings here, too

Open strings — D DUD DUD DUD

  • D = Down, U = Up
  • Have a metronome playing at a speed of 50BPM (50 beats per minute). Play this SP (strumming pattern) with this beat. — Remember to count yourself in at the start of this. Say “One, Two, Three, Four” with the beat
  • If that’s^ a big struggle, just play one strum every 4 beats
  • I like your nice and loud playing on these. But also try to strum these SP’s lightly
  • Try it on the above mentioned chords, too

Frets 0, 1 & 3 of the High E string

  • Play each fret individually. One by one. — Strumming a full chord like above needs more of a swing in your hand and arm. For single notes like this, you need a smaller push down with your thumb. Think of it not as a strum, but rather as an instant  push-down through the string; like your pick is already on the other side of the string the moment you start your plucking motion. — It sounds ridiculous, but this is a way to start getting the feeling for picking (that is, plucking with the guitar pick) single notes
  • Fret zero just means play an open string. You don’t hold down any frets. And only that string, in this case
  • Have the fingers directly to the left of the frets — For certain chords, that won’t be possible. The idea is just to have the fingers on left of your fret somewhere. Never directly on top of the fret

Additional notes

In the coming days, I may add a Google Drive link to this homework post. There will be additional resources like videos and PDF’s that will be needed for a lot of the homework I give.

Thank you, Ronan. See you next weekend!