Sunshine-Eyed Girl

Over the last few days I’ve been working on strumming as well as putting in some new chords. The first attempt was Brown Eyed Girl, which was great practice and I managed to get the hang of it. I also did Paperback Writer which can be described as mainly G but with a little bit of C. Because you don’t have to change much you can concentrate on the strumming pattern.

I started poking around at a few songs that came to mind, and settled on You Don’t Need the Sunshine by Catatonia. This has a whole lot more new chords and I’ve been giving myself a proper workout trying to do it properly!

 

You are My Creep

Armed with yesterday’s chords (and following a YouTube trail) I came across this tutorial for playing “You are my Sunshine” with C, F and G

New discovery: Playing and singing at the same time is much harder than I thought it would be!

Later on, Jon suggested playing these in this order…preferably jauntily.

C – 0003

E7 – 1202

F – 2010

F minor – 1013

…Radiohead!

I’m still struggling a bit with Fm, mainly because of my little finger which is being a bit rebellious.

By practicing a little bit every so often throughout the day, I’m starting to get more confident moving my fingers around the fret board, and forming the chords properly. Practising the changes has been really helpful too.

Notably, though, this is still fun.

Ukulele!

I have had a guitar for a little while now and have had a few battles with it, trying to get my hands to do the strange things it demanded. My friend Jon has helpfully started to show me a few things to do with it over Skype and started to iron out some of the basic problems I was having. This has been really useful, but the strings are still hurting my hands which makes it hard to practise. Also, my hands aren’t especially strong. I bought a ukulele, on advice from Jon that this would be a useful and entertaining thing to do. He was right! Here it is… When I got it home yesterday I spent some time tuning it (more on that story later…) and watched a video which taught me three chords  – C Major, F Major and G Major.

For future reference, they’re here:

C – 0003

F – 2010

G – 0132

The surprising thing was that I was able to make fast progress. I’m not saying it was effortless or that my fingers didn’t hurt after a while (which they do after playing the guitar for even a few minutes), but after messing about with it for a bit, I was able to do everything in the video apart from the songs. It has already made my mam laugh until she cried at a song of her own composition, and it has been in the house less than 24 hours. On the useful side, it’s certainly helping me get the hang of strumming and placing my fingers on the fret board, which will help with the guitar too in time. n.b. In the middle of writing this post I was looking for the video above and ended up wandering to another video and playing more… this is how trying something new should be!