E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A...

That's what you'd hear on my street tonight, wafting out on the (somewhat, for here) humid summer air. I'm surprised my neighbors haven't organized a lynching yet. They claim not to notice the freaky-deaky noises emitting from my house at 1 in the morning. I guess if they'll put up with ranchero music 12 hours a day, they probably won't complain about anything.

Chords are weird. Evidently you don't need to hit all the strings in a chord for it to still be a chord. This must be dominant notes my musician friends keep going on about. The other notes you strike in a chord are just flavoring. Some strings you never hit in a chord. From my guitar book, I recall the chords are organized somehow into chord families. G, C, and D go together in one family, E, A, and D (again, I think) got together in another family. I guess I am learning something.

Tonight I got:

• a computer program to teach you how to play the blues/rock
• a video by GIT alum Tom Kolb
• a slide

in my quest to get guitar learnin' into my head (and perhaps more importantly, my fingers) as quickly as I can. The slide sounds nice, but I am way far away from being able to use it. The Tom Kolb DVD, OTOH, looks much more useful. The book I have been using so far is kinda slow for me to figure out how to use (read: I have a hard time using it to learn because I am an unfocused dingus), whereas the video is at the other end of the spectrum:

Ok, these are the six strings e-B-G-D-A-E, this is an E chord, this is an A chord, strum 4 E, 4 A, good, now strum 2 down (this is where I think the partial chord stuff snuck in) then 1 then pause and repeat, now do that in E twice then switch to A twice, good, but I want to quickly show you D...

And so it went, spiraling out of my control rapidly (he went from E-A-D-G-B-F in like 5 minutes), until I paused the DVD, went back to the little booklet to look at the chord diagrams.

E...E...E-E-E-E (pause, adjust fingers) A (sorta, let's move those fingers a little more and press harder)... A...A-A-A-A (pause) E. E. E-E-E (stop to adjust finger position to stop buzzing noise), etc, etc, etc. At the end I had the pause down to 1-2 seconds. I needs me a lot of work. But, supposedly with E, A, and D I can do a bunch o' songs. We'll see.

Oh, they had free kittens at Guitar Showcase for some reason. Very cute. Guitar kitties (maybe they'll end up like these kittens someday). Not like mine, who don't seem to like my playing. But I guess I can't blame them.

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Listening to: World In My Eyes from the album Violator by Depeche Mode