Inquiry Post Week 2

As a reminder for my Inquiry project I chose to learn my favourite song, Shake the Frost by Tyler Childers on the guitar with zero prior experience. This week I started actually playing. I decided to focus on a small section of the song at a time to not overwhelm myself. This week I started on the intro. For this section I had to learn three different chords, F, C & G. The chords themselves I could figure out pretty easily, they used only three fingers on different frets, but as soon as it came to actually playing thee song I really struggled. On the F and C chord I had to take my finger off the string, strum two strings then hammer my finger I removed onto one of the two strings. It seems pretty simple, but because I’m not used to really using my fingers this way it takes way more coordination than I thought it would. Another issue is that holding the chords really hurts your fingers, overtime I’ll build some callouses and it will be easier but that will only come with time. I’ve been trying to hold myself to 20 minutes of playing everyday to help me reach my goal. Even though I was practicing everyday this week I still did not sound even close to what it is supposed to, so decided maybe I should dive into some of the basics to lead me better. I found this website, from the London Guitar Institute, that helped me clear up some misunderstands I had including where my finger should be resting on the fret. I had assumed it would be the middles, but it is supposed to be just behind. I am saving this as a resource to come back and over the next week I am going to try some of these techniques to improve my overall understanding of the guitar before I jump back into my chosen song.