| Guitar practice |
 Guitar practice
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Jun. 29th, 2009 @ 04:27 pm 
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Having practiced more-or-less non-stop for the best part of four hours, I went to hit a fret and felt this twinge all down my left forearm. And my fingertips are very hurty.
I am concluding from this that I need to take a break from guitar, but I somewhat resent it.
My tolerance for playing electric guitar is much greater than acoustic, because the electric is much thinner, and therefore my bad shoulder doesn't have to stretch at all to get my right hand in strumming position. So I don't have to stop after a few minutes because *that* hurts.
Today I started working on practicing some riffs, among general practice of chord progressions and scales.
Trevor, my main Guitar Dude, said that I was likely to practice more with a really good guitar, because it would just be more enjoyable to play. He's right. But another reason I like practicing with the electric guitar more is that it's less disruptive to my housemates. Acoustic guitars, by their design, are self-amplifying, and playing with normal firmness on the strings produces a fair whack of volume.
My electric guitar, meanwhile, is solid-bodied, a shaped block of wood with no resonating cavity to amplify the sound of the strings. Without an amp, or if I'm using an amp but plugging headphones into the amp instead of using the speaker, the electric guitar is really very quiet. Which means that I can practice, including hitting the strings as hard as I like, without it making much noise around my housemates. (If I go up to my bedroom, it'll be inaudible elsewhere.)
In aid of people-are-around practicing, I'm planning on getting one last guitar accessory: amPlug VOX Mini Guitar Amp. Runs off batteries, no leads or cables - it just plugs into the guitar's jack and you plug headphones into it. Much more convenient than even my small, cheap, rather crappy amp, let alone my big, decent amp which is itself waaaaay too heavy to take up and down stairs. (And is almost guaranteed to have better sound quality - my small cheap amp was VERY cheap, and has its uses, but it's genuinely pretty rubbish. I mostly use it as a secondary computer speaker for downstairs.)
After that, I'm done spending money on guitars for the foreseeable future (except to buy strings as needed, strings being the major ongoing cost factor of guitars - which isn't that expensive).
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