Late and slow, but I'm finally making some progress in my guitar adventure.

I've been constantly surprised by how discouraging even the smallest new challenge has been to my taking time to practice, and of course not practicing means staying stuck behind those challenges (there's a whole other topic of what does and doesn't motivate me to do the work of a skill in order to get better at it applying to writing and coding as well as playing music, but I’m going to save that for another time).

These issues only work themselves out with time and practice, and time and practice WILL work them out, my chief struggle, though, is dealing with the discouragement I feel running up against these challenges and trying to find a way past those feelings not involving setting the guitar back in its stand and walking away.

The Challenges
Chords - This was the most obvious issue I was aware of when I started. There were a huge number of positions for my hand and fingers on the fret board, and I was going have to learn them. What I didn’t realize was even when I was comfortable with the basics of a given chord, G, say, getting my wide sausage fingers to correctly contact the right strings and ONLY the right strings was going to require more conscious effort that I was mentally prepared for.

Chord changes - G to E minor, no problem. G to C and back again, sure, if you're not in a hurry.

Barre chords - There was a brief moment after I consulted several YouTube videos about this problem where I could successfully hit an F. That moment has escaped and will need to be hunted down and rounded up again. In the mean time this deficit has severely restricted finding songs to try and practice on. The darned things are everywhere!

Using the pick - This is probably the most surprising thing I've run into: I don’t have a clue how to use the pick. I generally feel pretty comfortable strumming down strokes with my thumb, but when I try the same with a pick things devolve rapidly to discord both in terms of sound and my ability to properly hit all the strings in a chord. It never occurred to me the base action of strumming with a pick was going to be it’s own skill, not to mention one I would struggle so much with.

Strumming patterns - I figured once I got a basic set of chords down, I’d be good to play at least a couple songs. Stoke down on the strings of a chord, change to another chord, stroke down again, repeat. Instead, there’s a whole range of patterns combining down and up strokes defining tempo as well as the sound of a song, and when you combine an embarrassing level of incoordination with my existing pick issues, cacophony prevails.

Tempo - Then there’s tempo itself. Keeping a beat is obviously a key part of any musical expression, but it’s also another thing which I have no aptitude for, and thus struggle to understand much less implement.

I do finally feel like I'm making some progress in handling the discouragement which is leading to more practice which is leading to at least some improvements. We'll see what another year brings.