Guitar Musings

My Daughter is taking guitar lessons and she was assigned to write a little song and write it out in standard notation.  I knew that I could get staff paper from the Internet in PDF or gif/jpg format but I stumbled upon a site that gave me even more options.

The site that I found is www.blanksheetmusic.net.  There, you can customize your staves to fit your needs.  First, you start with a blank sheet and go from there.  There are options to add more staves and connect them for piano or ensemble pieces and to add add tab to your project.  One feature that I liked, in particular, was the ability to adjust the size of my staves.  In my case, I needed to enlarge it to make it easier for her to write her piece.  Once you are finished with the customization, they give you the option to save it for future use (requires registration).  If you don’t need/want to customize, they have pre-configured staff paper available for you to use as well.  It’s as easy as customize and print.  I great resource for any songwriter.

Remember that old tip, in english class, where if your stumped on what your going to write, you’re instructed to scrawl “I don’t know what to write” over and over until you get past that block and continue with your writing.  I’m working on a couple of projects and on all of them, I’m stumped, can’t move past that one line or chord. 

Which leads me to the my question, “what is the guitarist version of ‘I don’t know what to write’?”

 I’ve tried recording writing, down the progressions, learning new tunes, etc….   The only two things that have helped a bit was to hum the melody over the chords or run it over and over again in my head.  I try to do this in order to hopefully polish these skills nad move on.  My best friend tells me that the reason why I’m so stumped is because I try to get it perfect and I won’t move on until it is, which is partially true.  He also says that I need to treat it as a rough draft that will get polished soon enough. 

Anyway…  I’ll keep pluggin’ away.