Sloppy fretting

I haven't posted in a while.

I was in Wales for two months and did manage to keep up my practicing there, but with less regularity than at home.

I was practicing the other day, working on Ode to joy in fact, and I realized that I am not as attentive to my fretting as I should be. I find that with nobody listening that I can sometimes fret a note pretty far from the metal. Anyway, I decided to really concentrate on fretting things carefully and was amazed at how much nicer several pieces sounded.

It's a fairly obvious point, but it just highlighted the importance of vigilance in my practicing.

Will the circle be unbroken

I'm working on a classic, done in Carter-style. It's got up-down strums all the way through. I tried it with only down-strums, but it definitely doesn't sound as good. This is taxing my limited strumming abilities, or at least it feels like it's taxing them. Something to work on.

Although I've now decided that pieces I master tend to lose their interest. That is, by the time I learn how to play them well enough and by memory, I like them less.

Schade.

Masters of War

An old Dylan classic. Really simple strum and chords: Dm and Csus2 (capo on 3). Nice

Going electric

I got a new guitar for my birthday yesterday!

It's electric!

It's a "starter" model, which is just right. I need to see if I enjoy playing electric before I go off an invest any money in a nice one.

So far, I see several things. First, it's wonderfully forgiving with misfingered chords. Nothing buzzes. Wow!

On the other hand, that fretboard is really narrow, so it's really hard to do anything fancy on the fretboard.

The strings are correspondingly close together, so it's hard to do any interesting fingerpicking.

And I find I have to be pretty careful with the pick, not to run into the pickups.

But it's really pretty....