[Anthony-G]

Thanks. As a beginner guitarist just starting to get into ear-training, that all sounds like good advice. However, I’m curious as to what you mean by “Put on a loop”?

I also looked up Transcribe! and see that they have a Linux installer (32-bit in addition to the 64-bit!) so I must try it out: https://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/download.html

[epiccoleman]

By "put on a loop" I mean "play a sequence of known chords in a loop" - so that you can practice playing and singing notes in context (i.e. in context of a song, jam, etc).

There are tons of backing tracks available on YouTube, but a loop pedal is more versatile, allowing you to play arbitrary chord progressions and workshop them.

Transcribe! is a seriously great piece of software, it's got everything you need to get started with transcription. Another great way is to just get in the habit of tabbing out little melodies that get stuck in your head. (Yes, it's fine to start transcribing in tablature, reading standard music notation is a great skill but not necessary to get started.)

hubguitar.com has a little tool for building printable blank tab sheets which I used years ago to create a few PDFs, of which I've printed dozens of copies over the years.

Hope that's helpful! Music is cool!

[Anthony-G]

Thanks for the clarification about playing to a loop.

I have an iPhone and was thinking I could probably learn enough Garageband to create some simple loops that I could play along to. I’m currently at the stage where I’m still working on my timing and developing a solid rhythm (which doesn’t come naturally to me) so until now I’ve been focussing on strumming chords.

I’ve been following Justin Sandercoe’s lessons and was recently learning to play “A Girl Like You”¹. Up until this lesson, Justin always told the learner exactly what notes to play in a riff but for this one, he left it up to the learner to figure it out themselves. He gave enough clues for a beginner like me to figure it out (e.g., that notes are in the C minor pentatonic scale and that they go up and down followed by a big jump up, etc.). I had to listen very carefully and it took me a while but with the clues, I eventually figured out how to play the riff. I got a much greater buzz from learning this way, instead of simply being spoon-fed the notes so this has sparked my interest in ear-training and transscribing.

A looper pedal does sound like something that would be useful in the future when I start to learn more lead parts but I don’t think I’d benefit from it right now. Thanks, also, for the Hub Guitar recommendation. I hadn’t come across that site before and it looks like a good resource.

There’s a lot of bad shit in the modern world but if you want to learn music, it’s a great time to be alive: there are so many great resources for learning, good quality guitars are cheap, my €120 Spark Go modelling amp can emulate more tones than I could ever want, my smart-phone can be a metronome, tuner, ear-trainer, or digital audio workstation – and with Apple Music play 90% of the music I might want to listen to.

¹ https://www.justinguitar.com/songs/edwyn-collins-a-girl-like...

[epiccoleman]

You can _definitely_ learn enough garage band to make a simple loop! It's very easy to set up, actually - at least on desktop, and I'm sure it's similar enough on the mobile app.

You can mark a section on the timeline to loop, and if you record when you're in that state, it'll just continually record to that same section of track. You can also set it up to do a metronome count in before actually recording. So, if you can manage to stay on time for 2 or 4 bars in one go, you can just record some quarter note strums into your phone mic - bang, perfectly serviceable loop for practice.

You can even start out with just a loop of a single chord to get a sense for how different notes sound against it in context. When that gets boring, do a little I-V or I-IV loop and try to notice the change in feel of different notes in, say, the major pentatonic scale for the root note. Then try a twelve bar blues, and then, ya know, whatever. It's a lot of fun, I'll often just toss out a quick loop and noodle if I've got ten minutes between meetings or a long build or something.

[Anthony-G]

I upvoted your comment earlier but I figure thanking you explicitly for that advice would be more courteous. So, thanks!

[epiccoleman]

You're welcome! Hope you have fun.