I’ve hit my first road block on my learning project journey. I’m down and out this week with the flu. As I write this, I’m in bed surrounded by Advil, vitamins, chicken noodle soup, and multiple herbal teas. As a result, my progress this week has been minimal, but not a complete bust as I still managed to get my five hours of practice time in.

This weekend I began to practice chords on the guitar. For you non-music buffs a chord is a combination of single notes played at the same time. So far, I’m finding it challenging. My fingers can not seem to memorize where to be on the strings fast enough. Also, they hurt!

A few people warned me about the implications guitars strings would cause my fingers, but I was quick to brush it off as something that only effected the fragile finger pads of children. The burn like marks on index and middle finger are real however, and make every day tasks like simply turning a page uncomfortable. I also found my hands cramp up a lot when I play, from the unnatural baseball bat like grip needed.

While my hands healed, I took the opportunity to look up a couple YouTube videos on how to push past troubles with my clumsy fingers. One that I found particularly helpful was about muscle memory. It explained that if you simply practicing holding and releasing the position of the chord without playing it the movement will eventually become second nature to your hands. I had some good initial progress practicing this before falling ill this week.

During this next week I still want to maintain my focus on playing chords, and hopefully be able to make more progress! Fingers crossed ill be able to make enough to be able to post a progress video. Stay tuned!

Some of the chords I’ve been learning- the circles are the notes where I place my fingers