Sensitive Tip

How erotic.
My guitar *cough* skills *cough*, like so many others, are self taught. Up unto this point, I believe that I've had lazy fingers with wrist attachment. I discovered this yesterday when I finally tried to play with my new "F" work around. Instead of getting that nice solid sound from a string, it sounded like it was vibrating against tinfoil. Not a pretty sound. My hypothesis gained further merit when I was playing the oh-so-simple Good Riddance. I was happily strumming along and it happened again. At first I thought I simply wasn't pushing hard enough or close enough to the frets. I had recently changed strings to some Martin 80/20 Bronze light acoustic strings. Maybe this was the source of my new found problem, because it certainly wouldn't be anything I was doing.
I started cascading my strums a little more, to see where the problems were coming from, which lead to a two fold hypothesis. The pair of my lower gaged strings and the improper finger pressure created ungodly sounds. While I could be lazy with my older strings, these new strings actually require me to use the tips instead of the (for lack of a better term) balls. Since changing to the tips, sounds have been more pure, but the downside is that new pressure that's place on my wrist. It's just something more to get used to, which will probably lead to the ability to play barre chords a little better. We'll see what happens.

F, that hurts.

Excuse my newbie blood to the guitar world.
By far, I'm the worst of the group but with good reason. I only started playing the guitar, and I mean really only started playing in October. Although I've had my cheapie $50 acoustic for a good number of years, I just never touched it. Sure I went through bouts that lasted the whole of a week, but that really didn't keep the calluses. I digress.
I recently purchased a CAPO for the sole purpose of learning Barenaked Ladies tracks, as they use them pretty extensively. I thought I would try and brave Brian Wilson. I scanned the first couple of pages of Brian Wilson from "The Best of Barenaked Ladies" (ISBN 0-7692-1579-3) and found no traces of barre (I think that's what they're called) chords so I thought I was all good. Wrong. The lyrics "if you wanna find me I'll be (F) out in the sand box..." stopped me dead in my tracks. F. A barre chord. Or is it? (please excuse if I wrote these out wrong)

e----1----
B----1----
G----2----
D----3----
A----3----
E----1----

Further investigation found an alternate. An alternate I will surely use to avoid KILLING MY WRIST to play that dreaded F. If you're lazy like me, and your fingers are fast enough,

e----5----
B----3----
G----2----
D----4----
A----x----
E----x----

I haven't really tried playing "Brian Wilson" with this new found F'in joy, but I will soon. Perhaps I'll get a little YouTube action going on, so you can see exactly how poor my abilities are.
Also, the boys and I are getting together over the weekend for a little Jamage. Perhaps a report will appear soon after by any or all three of us.

Barred from making chords

There was a quote on the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer many moons ago that really struck a chord with me. Oz (as played by Seth Green) had a conversation with one of his band mates

Devon: Man, we need a roadie. Other bands have roadies.
Oz: Well, other bands know more than three chords. Your professional bands can play up to six, sometimes seven completely different chords.
Devon: That's just, like, fruity jazz bands.

For me it goes beyond simply not being able to play a lot of chords. I can play a lot of chords however I still have issues with barre chords. A barre chord will have a construction similar to this:

e----5--------
B----5--------
G----6--------
D----7--------
A----7--------
E----5--------

Whereas your standard (and my staple) 5th chord would consist of the top 3 notes (actually the bottom if you're looking at the tab above) a barre chord will use every string. Oddly my issues is with the same string every time. The occursed B string. Unfortunately I have severely limited flexibility in my fingers. If others are double-jointed, I'm half-jointed. The little crease behind the knuckle of my pinky gives the B string just enough play so that it doesn't press against the frets. For those not guitar-savvy that means instead of a *DING* of a note I get the *DUNK* of a dead-note. so my barre chords look more like this:

e----5--------
B----x--------
G----6--------
D----7--------
A----7--------
E----5--------

This is really screwing me up on "Yellow Led Better" by Pearl Jam which is an awesome guitar song, awesome song all around and as a bonus not that difficult to sing. Even on my ESP F-50 (which has a pretty low action) I still can't make this chord properly. Alas I guess practice makes perfect so it'll have to be back to the drawing board.

we will we will rock you