I Started Playing Guitar…
about five months ago! I began in Tonga when I met a Belgian girl from another boat that plays beautiful Spanish flamenco guitar. She gave me some of her sheet music and I started practicing on Dad’s Ovation.
An Ovation is a really nice brand of guitar; Dad’s has a round fiberglass back, steel strings, and a thin neck that is perfect for people with small hands. I am now very spoiled, because an Ovation is a quality guitar with an excellent sound.
The first song I tried was a Spanish waltz from the sheet music I got. It’s a nice song, and pretty easy to play. The good thing is that it sounds complicated and advanced, so people think that it is a difficult song. I thought that it was going to be difficult for me to work out that song, because I had not read sheet music since a year ago in piano lessons. The process seemed complicated, first I had to find the notes in the music, then I had to find out where it was on the guitar, and then I had to decide how I would position my hands on the fret board. I taught myself that song in about three hours so I guess it was not as hard as I thought it was going to be. After that it took another couple of days to memorize it. I had to memorize it because I could not read the notes as fast as the song is played. Even now, when I actually look at the music for that song, I do not read the notes as “a” through “g”; each note or group of notes represents a position on the neck of the guitar for me and I read it that way.
The other two songs I got are called “Mazurka” and “Sertaneja”. Sertaneja is a duet, so for a long time I would only play the easy top part; later, when Molly borrowed a piano from some of our friends, she worked out the bottom part on the piano and we played it together.
In Tonga there is a restaurant called La Paella that had a “jam night”; anyone who wanted to could come and play or listen to music. That was the first time I played guitar for an audience besides my family. I played the one song I had in my repertoire at the time, the Spanish waltz. Aquarium Café held an open-mike night for cruisers and I played the waltz there too. That was my second performance. The audience cheered wildly, which boosted my confidence. By the time that Aquarium Café hosted its second open-mike night, I had added the top part of “Sertaneja”, part of “Mazurka”, and “Windy and Warm”, a song that dad taught me, to my repertoire; I played those too.
When we got to New Zealand, we met some kids from a boat called Azul, from England. At the time we met, there were 13-year old twins and a 15-year old brother. The twins, a boy and a girl named Daniel and Anderson, turned 14 soon after. That spoiled our fun slightly, because we wanted to say we had found 13-year old twins like us! What made up for that, though, is that Anderson and Josh, the older brother, plays the piano and Daniel plays the guitar. We have a lot of fun with them!
I got some guitar tabs from Daniel and soon I had a couple more songs that I could play from memory. We also had a lot of fun looking through the music stores and admiring all of the guitars while Anderson, Josh, and Molly were looking longingly at pianos that lit up when you played them.
For those of you that do not play the guitar, guitar tabs are another format for reading music. They are a lot easier to read while playing the guitar, because they have six lines that represent the six strings of the guitar.
When Daniel got a really nice new nylon string guitar for Christmas, I got to borrow his old one. I am having a lot of fun playing that one now. There is a big difference in playing a nylon-string guitar and a steel-string like Dad’s Ovation, but they are both fun to play. Dad is also very glad that I am not hogging his guitar now!
I have found a great site on the internet for printing out guitar tabs; the address is www.chordie.com. It is hard to find free sheet music on the internet, so now I am using tabs; they are a lot easier to read. I am working on a couple of new songs that I printed off of that web site. Those songs are “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”, “Blackbird”, and “Classical Gas”. I know, the last song sounds strange, but it is a very nice song.
I converted the Spanish waltz into tabs for anyone who reads tabs. I have also included that and the sheet music in the media gallery. The sheet music is a bit scribbled on, because it is a copy of borrowed sheet music. A a later date I might put the tabs for “Sertaneja” and “Mazurka” in the media gallery also. I hope any musician will have fun playing these songs! ~ Jessie
Question of the Week
See if you can find the correct answer to the question! We will continue to post questions along with the answer to the previous question! Have fun!
The answer to last week’s question is: To convert degrees Centigrade to degrees Fahrenheit, double the Centigrade number, deduct ten percent of that, and add 32 degrees.
Have fun with this week’s question!
If Ruby Slippers was at 19 degrees 4’ 48” South latitude and 169 degrees 55’ 32” West longitude, which island would we be on?