I'm trying to work on my guitar playing but, man, my musical ear is total crap. Plus I can never figure out how to tune out stuff like the melody and only focus on one thing at a time like the chords.

And my sense of rhythm is equally bad. I was surprised to see that "Somebody" and "I ain't..." don't start at the beginning of the measure. They start an eighth note before. Also I don't even know if that "mini-measure" of just an eighth has a specialized a name.

Ah....

      • inshallah2 [none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        After bought my guitar in September of 2020 I wrote two instrumental songs. I discarded both them because they were awful. Then I watched that very video and I decided to try songwriting again but not stupidly starting from zero. I'd start with those four chords. I played the progression over and over. Little by little I made progress. And sometime in early Spring, 2021 I had song I was actually pretty happy with. I call it "Joy". The problem is that even now - it's still too hard for me to play correctly. It uses delay à la The Edge so if I start doing thing wrong - it gets ugly. I've played the song 100s of times but I've gone weeks or months not playing it because I get frustrated.

        A few days ago - after not playing it for two months I started practicing it again and I kept forgetting the chords and the fingerings. I had to write notes to myself like "The Bm chord is the highest four strings. It's not five, dummy." When it comes to delay chords that use more strings can get mushy or turn into mush.

        Maybe I'll share "Joy" sometime this year. But I have yet to record myself. I've put that off because if I sound far worse than I think - I'll get disgusted and put the song on the shelf again.