Finger pickin' good

Learning the guitar wasn't getting boring, but it perhaps needed a bit of freshness. I'd worked my way through most of the beginner's course on www.andyguitar.co.uk and had tried nearly all the songs - certainly the ones I was interested in playing. There were varying degrees of success with this, as you'd imagine, but for the most part I seemed to have got the basics down, could play the chords and could change between them. So, what next?

And now for something completely different. Well, slightly different.

I noticed a section on the site called scales. I'd already briefly tried one, so knew this wasn't a web page about fish or weighing instruments. People who have tried to learn an instrument will probably have encountered scales at some point and they are often the bane of people's lives. From what I can gather it's playing every note in a particular key, working your way up and then back down.

This required a rather different way of playing. So far I'd been working mainly with chords, which involved strumming most of the strings. Playing scales - which leads to cool guitar riffs - means playing each individual string. I've no idea if finger picking is the correct term for this, but it seemed a good name for the blog. If it's wrong sue me - although you're wasting your time as I don't have much money. Although, in a cruel irony, you might be able to get my guitar and that would be the end of these blogs - and then where would be?

Try to sue and you'll have my crack legal team to deal with

Anyway. First up - and to be honest the only one I've really had a sustained go at so far - is C Major. There's two ways of playing it. There's an easy way, which only involves the bottom two strings, and the harder way that involves playing a few more. Unsurprisingly, the two string way seems to involve playing three or four notes on each string - with the other way two seems to be the most. It takes a wee while to master and the rule of thumb seems to be to be able to go up and down each scale perfectly four times before moving on. That doesn't mean you've mastered it, but if you can't handle the basics then you've no chance when things get a bit more complicated.

There's a total of 10 songs to learn at this stage, most of which I've managed to go through. As you'd imagine, it starts off easy and gets increasingly hard. As an added twist, for some reason there don't seem to be tabs for the various songs so I have to watch the video and try to remember the notes before playing myself. As if learning to play new songs wasn't hard enough...

It's a wide and varied selection. There's Happy Birthday - thankfully I don't need to pay a copyright fee every time I do it - there's Ode to Joy and there's Oh When the Saints, a great song to learn considering my football allegiances. But most interesting is The Chain by Fleetwood Mac.

The legendary Muddly Talker

I am a huge F1 fan and grew up to the BBC using the riff from The Chain as the intro to their coverage. Take The Chain, add in Murray Walker and you have a winning combination for a young boy. It was a travesty when ITV got the rights and didn't use the music and that, combined with the lack of adverts, was one of the best things about the BBC getting the rights back in 2009. The chance to play it so early in my guitar learning career is not to be missed. Incredibly, it's fairly straightforward - and it's popular as well as there's plenty of tabs kicking around the internet, making it even easier.

So, let's weigh up how learning scales has gone so far - see what I did there? Like everything so far, it seems to have been rather difficult to start with but has quickly got better with a bit of practice. And things would be a heck of a lot easier if I could see the tabs.

All through this guitar learning journey I've been practising for an hour or so every day. The only times I've not done this is when I've not been able to, due to meetings and such like. It certainly hasn't been out of choice and two or three days is probably the longest time I've gone without picking up the guitar. That all changed when I went on holiday for a week.

A hungry, hungry squirrel on holiday. Well, I was on holiday, nobody knows about the squirrel apart from the squirrel itself.

When I got back and tried to play the guitar for the first time it felt... strange. It wasn't quite as if I'd never played it before but it certainly felt unusual and I had to go back to some easier stuff to get myself back up to speed. Thankfully that only lasted a day or two and the fact I had long finger nails probably didn't help. Now that's out of the way I can get back to trying to scale new heights - hoho!