Here are my first attempts at playing the D major and E minor chords. Pretty bad. I’ll continue to practice slowly alternating between the two chords and then I’ll attempt to record an Asynchronous Jam with the Class Recording: Strumming D major and E minor. Then, I’ll learn A minor.
Strumming D major and E minor (Badly)
It took some time, but I was finally able to string my guitar with new D’Addario Medium Light strings. This is the process I worked through. Using pliers, I gently tugged the bridge pins from the bridge, removed the old strings and then placed the ball end of each new string into their respective bridge hole. I then inserted the end of each string through the hole of each tuning-post. Next I had wind each string around its post. I found an informative video on YouTube demonstrating how to string a guitar and do a funky little loop around each post. I had to watch it a couple of times just to get the direction of the loop right.
All up, it took me about 45 minutes to finish stringing my guitar. Now it’s time to tune it.
I had tried using a number of different guitar tuner apps to tune my guitar. I had even tried using the web-based guitar tuner. I felt like they were more suited to people with a bit more guitar experience than me. That’s ok. I just needed something with a little more instructional scaffolding. That’s why I liked I Guitar TUNA! I was able to select the string on the app I wanted to tune, pick the same string on the guitar and then adjust the tuning key according to the feedback provided by the coloured line drawn by the pen on the graph paper and the Tune up or Tune down instructions that were displayed. Once the line was drawn in the middle of the graph paper and coloured green I knew that the string was tuned. I then followed the same process for the remaining strings. With more experience and the need to play songs with alternate tunings, I might find Guitar TUNA! restrictive, but for now it’s my tuner of choice.
