Rock & Roll 101

April 22nd, 2025

We continued with Where's My Love, and wrote out some more chords for the bridge (and as it turned out, the pre-bridge). We went through it a few times at 70% speed.

April 15th, 2025

Isabella did a great job tonight. We went over Where's My Love by SYML, speeding it up from 60% to 75% a bit at a time, to see if we could play along with it. By the end, we got it up to 85%!

I'm very proud of the job she did tonight! Next week we'll move on to the next section of the song which has some different chords.

April 8th, 2025

April 1st, 2025

We continued with The Water Is Fine. Isabella is doing well with playing, she just needs to dedicate some time to improving her quickness to get to some chords.

I recommended taking the guitar out of the case and putting it somewhere accessible to make it a visual reminder.

Good job tonight!

March 25th, 2025

We continued working through The Water is Fine tonight, playing along with the song right up until the bridge at 75% of the original speed.

Isabella can switch quickly from the E minor to the A minor, and between G and other chords, but she was a bit slow on the F, so we focused a lot on that.

This week she should work on switching the chords as quickly as she can, especially getting to the F and G.

March 18th, 2025

Isabella played through Evergreen for me at full speed- a little behind on the chord changes, but she insisted on doing it at full speed so I went with it.

We then added a new song, called The Water is Fine by Chloe Ament, which is kind of a medieval sounding song in a minor key.

March 11th, 2025

We did some drills at the beginning, and Isabella did very well with them. We then went over Everygreen at a slow speed, and she did well with it.

After that, we added Fine Line, and took some look at the Night We Met.

Great job today!

March 4th, 2025

Isabella has had some struggles with motivation this week, so we talked a bit about adulting, and just pushing herself to not give in to laziness.

We went through Evergreen, and then did some drills of cold-playing chords, and also changing between chords.

February 25th, 2025

We worked through the chords of her song, Evergreen, and I wrote them out again on the page with the chord chart so she doesn't have to flip back and forth.

We changed the speed in YouTube to .6 speed so she could play along, and she just shaped the chords without strumming to get used to it.

February 18th, 2025

I forgot to ask if I could take your photo for my website! If you have a photo of Isabella playing the guitar like the photos on my website, it would be cool if you could email it to me for my site.

Today we went through the chord progression that Isabella has been working on, and I added two more for her to work on.

We then tried playing along with a slow drum beat. Here's the beat in case you want to practise with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxegkmgnx9Y

We then added our first song, but didn't get into it very far before running out of time (the link is below). "Everygreen"

February 4th, 2025

Tonight we learned some new chords, D, and A, and did some strumming through a chord progression I made to work on the chord switches. We talked about some strategies for switching chords, including changing all the fingers at once instead of one-at-a-time.

January 21st, 2025

In today's lesson, I showed Isabella how to change strings on her acoustic. Unfortunately I broke one of her strings (Sorry!) but they had a replacement which seems to have worked fine.

January 14th, 2025

We continued through the E minor and G chords, and A minor - switching between them.
We added the C chord.
Practise switching between the chords - without moving all your fingers.

Practise exercising the fingers.

January 7th, 2025

This was Isabella's first lesson. We learned the parts of the guitar, and three starting chords: E minor, G, and A minor. We learned the difference between major and minors, and I showed her how to try to change chords by not lifting fingers that are common between the chords. I asked her to practise at least 10 minutes a day and to try to switch between the chords quickly and smoothly.