Guitar lesson no.1

Today i just started going for my newest guitar lessons, the teacher being this malay guy called Sha'ari Jaffri.

The venue is at parklane mall, at selegie road, beside dhoby gaut. The studio's name is Guitar Garage.

So anyway i'm making use of blogspot's functions with time and date and structured posts to help aid my progress in lessons and also to keep track of what i'm learning and lessons i should practice.

Strings/Maintenance

First things first was the gauge of the strings, i'm going to stick to a 9-42 set.

Before re-stringing, applying some kinda moisturizer to the wood of the fretboard is good for the guitar's maintenance. Also some kinda solution for the body of the guitar to keep it clean too. gotta get some of those stuffs.

about re-stringing, i shld keep the excess trimmed to roughly ahead of the string hole itself, sounds kinda dumb while typing it now but basically for the 6th string i'll place it to the 5th string's hole and snip it there.

following that, the next step is to make a loop with the string above the end once, followed by under the end for roughly 2-4 more loops to get it in tune.

Co-ordination exercises

While going up the fretboard in a chromatic scalish style, i was taught to try my best to control my fingers esp. my pinky. keeping them low and near the strings would improve my pacing and allow for faster play in future.

Right handed technique is the one i'm having more of a problem with at the moment, holding of the pick at a 45 degree towards the strings is the proper way of doing it.

Other than that, keeping the wrist on the guitar body itself is the difficult part as i've been so used to strumming wildly on my acoustic guitar.

accenting the first stroke downwards really helps to keep the wrist moving in the proper up and down motion that needs to be natural, for now i'm still too rigid.

Theory

For today a little of the music theory was covered, the normal major or minor chords are known as triads

Major - 1 3 5
Minor - 1 b3 5

take for example the A chord it would end up like this

Major - A C# E
Minor - A C E

The list of numbers that he wrote down was as such

Root
Min 2
Maj 2
Min 3
Maj 3
Per 4
Augmented 4th/Diminished 5th
Per 5
Min 6
Maj 6
Min 7
Maj 7
Next octave.

while at the moment i still don't really understand where the 1 3 5 pattern results in the A C# and E i'll just have to try to figure it out on my own.

Another thing that was taught to me was the 7th chord. Basically there are 4 forms of the chord taught to me atm.

Major 7 1 3 5 7
Dominant 7 1 3 5 b7
Minor 7 1 b3 5 b7
Min7b5 1 b3 b5 b7

For the guitar form, our fingers are placed in the order of 1, 5, 7, 3 in the order of index finger, middle, etc.

The most basic C Maj 7 chord form tabbed out would be

Cmaj7 035450 following which the others would fall into place such as
Cdm7 035350
Cmin7 035340
Cmin7b5 034340

Fretboard

A A# B C C# D D# E F F# G G# A
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
E F F# G G# A A# B C C# D D# E

those are the notes on the 5th and 6th fret.. i'll have to memorise that by next week.

In summary,
1. Re-stringing
2. Left/Right hand exercises
3. Fret board memorisation
4. 7th chord memorisation.