Learning the Guitar

Chanda Plummer
Lehman College
Caro, Natalie
September 16, 2016
The time I learned something new
Throughout my life I have learned many things. I am only eighteen years old so there is still so much to learn. There was one thing I learned a couple of weeks ago that I am very proud of. It was how to tune a guitar. My boyfriend had this guitar in his apartment that was just sitting in a corner collecting dust. Now since I am a music lover and somewhat pianist by ear, I was highly intrigued. Not knowing he played the guitar I bombarded him with a bunch of questions in which he replied that he actually doesn’t know how to play. He eventually gave me the guitar because he said I was more musically inclined and I would have a better use with it. I was so excited and could not believe that he gave me a guitar, like it was a whole entire guitar. I immediately told him that no matter what happens, I’m keeping it. I played the guitar for a couple of days trying to play things by ear until one day it sounded unpleasant. I thought to myself why does it sound like this. Then I thought “Duh, guitars have to be tuned”. I did not know how to tune a guitar and at the moment I was not trying to learn. I told my boyfriend that he was going to have to tune it for me. The next time he came over I asked him to tune it and show me how to. He had this app that showed you what it is supposed to sound like and in what areas your guitar needs to be tuned. He did it and I was lost. I eventually realized that if I am going to have a guitar, I am going to need to tune it myself. So I googled how to tune a guitar and unfortunately I was coming up with stuff that only confused me. It brought me to sites that were showing me things as if I were already an experienced guitar player, which I was not. I then went on YouTube to see if any videos could maybe explain it any better than the random sites. But I guess my luck that day was running short because I could not grasp what they people in...