Class #2, Tuesday 9/15/09

Intro to Guitar (3:30pm)

We need to continue working on the chord charts. It is very important to have a strong understanding of how these work before we can move on to other things. Start with the EZ G and EZ C chords and work your way to some of the chords that you use more than one finger for. These shapes are the most important thing that we’re going to work on for the whole class, so you need to have a strong understanding of them.

Guitar 1 (4pm)

We’re starting with folk music. This can also be traced to “traditional music” which is the oldest music in America. We’re not going that f’ar back for the stuff we cover in class, we’re starting with two tunes that are a bit more modern. The first is “California Stars” written by Woody Guthrie and performed by Wilco. The second is “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard” written and performed by Paul Simon.

Here’s “California Stars” at full speed:

A/A/E/E/D/D/A/A/

and a bit slower

The changes for this one shouldn’t be too hard. You’ll have to switch a lot faster for “Me And Julio..”

Here’s a super-slow version to start with

and a little more sped up

Here’s a loop of just the intro at about 35% the normal speed

Intermediate Guitar- (5pm)

The tunes that we’re focused on, “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard” and “California Stars”  are posted above, at various speeds, as are links to the artists that wrote and performed them. Your duty is to work on the chord positions further up the neck for each of these tunes. Work on each position by itself and then try to combine different ones. Your goal is to make this as natural feeling as the open chords feel, soon we’ll be adding some scale shapes to these chord shapes, and you’ll be in a position to do some really cool stuff, but you have to understand how the chord shapes work first to really get a good feel for this.I’ll post some more stuff soon.