(no subject)

[afuna]

Been afraid of saying anything, out of fear I'll scare away the motivation by mentioning it, but I've been playing guitar often enough / long enough that I'm finally starting to develop calluses.

I've been taking a scattershot approach: some evenings I follow a more structured approach (Andy Guitar when I've got the attention span; various apps when I don't). Other evenings I just sit down and play random songs from things people have put on the internet.

It's very nice to be able to sit down and have music come from my fingers. Like... like what, really, is this?

And because pop songs all take after one another, it turns out that even though there are like, a million different chords, half a dozen is enough to play most songs.

I'm still avoiding bar chords, but those come up so infrequently that I sometimes just don't *play* that one chord, and fill it in with my voice instead. (Cheater cheater <3)


I'm trying to wrap my brain around chord transposition. I've got something which takes an existing series of chord and transposes them, no problem. But then... I'm unsure what this means when I'm playing them on the guitar. Do I play on the same fret as I would pre-transposition, just with the new chord? Do I move one fret down for each step I've transposed? idk!

Comments

[zorkian]

It's fun to listen to you play and sing. :)

[afuna]

I'm glad <3 I used to feel shy playing with you around but now it just makes me happy.

[pauamma]

Go you!

[synecdochic]

so glad you have found something that maks you this happy!

[wychwood]

If you have transposed the chords, you should then play the new ones as if that was all you knew about. So if you had a sequence that used to go:

C Dm G

And you transpose it up a tone, you should end up with:

D Em A

You then forget all about the original chords and play D Em A exactly as normal, and sing along with them as normal; the result will be one tone (two frets) higher than the original.

Alternatively, instead of changing the names of the chord, you can put a capo on the second fret and play the original chords (C Dm G) treating the third fret of the guitar as the first fret.

[afuna]

Oh awesome thank you! That explains so much about why my attempts to transpose chords have all sounded so wrong <3

[ninetydegrees]

It's very nice to be able to sit down and have music come from my fingers.

You're making magic!

[afuna]

It is so so magical!

[vlion]

transposing is a translation of the frequencies +/- some amount, in equal parts per string.

Think of the fretboard as a coordinate system: a chord is picking out certain values on the x axis. Transposing is adding +/- x values to your fretboard-tuple.

This gets a bit mindboggling and confusing when you start studying what _keys_ are, but it's really very mathematically simple.

BTW. Feel free to find & poke me if you want more information here. My music knowledge has been languishing for a long long time, it'd be good to shake it out and share it. :-)

[afuna]

Aha yes. I will hit you up once I'm learning a bit more musical theory on my own and have questions :D (The key thing is a good one that I've not even dared approach).