My Daily Vlog

Sorry, I forgot to tell you guys, I am doing a daily vlog these days. It's already 28 days old at the time of this writing. Here is a link to the latest episode:

Guitar Hero 3

I promised to tell you this. Way back in 2010 (hehe, yes it seems like long ago) when I bought a guitar and started to try and learn it, I found that it was really, really hard work. In the beginning I got no pleasure out of it, and the whole thing about forming chords and then changing chords was so hard it was frustrating.

The biggest fear when learning guitar, for me, was that I might stop before I get any good at it. The fear of giving up, led to desperation and I tried to think of any way that I could keep up my motivation. I already had a Nintendo Wii, so the thought came to me that I might benefit by playing the Guitar Hero game on it. Guitar Hero, for those who don't know, is a game that you play with a plastic guitar. The Wii remote is plugged into the guitar and then you "play" the guitar using the unique buttons with both hands. So, you see stuff happening in vivid graphic detail on the screen and you play the guitar within that tune. Being a video game it has difficulty levels of Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert and other such concepts.

My thinking was that playing Guitar Hero will develop some of that hand dexterity that I need for playing real guitar as well as develop my timing and rhythm.  Also, with the screen graphics and playing with a full on-screen band will give me the quick gratification that real guitar could not.

As it happened, I played it exactly 2 times, in the same session and then the guitar joined the rest of the things that just collect dust in my room after I buy them.

Thankfully, I didn't give up on the real guitar and did learn a little bit. As you know I am still learning it, and despite my slow progress (because of the actual practice time I put in) I am learning more and more every week.

Then when I went crazy for Cliffs of Dover recently about 2 weeks ago I had more confidence than when I started. But still I know that Cliffs of Dover would be a hard song for me to play on guitar. So, I thought why don't we play it on Guitar Hero.

That's when I realized something bad about Guitar Hero.

Being a software engineer, I am very familiar with software versions. And to me, greater number means more functionality. Well, not in Guitar Hero. I had bought the latest version Guitar Hero 5 thinking this would include everything up that version. Well, not so. Cliffs of Dover is available in Guitar Hero 3 but not any other versions. I tried to find if I could download it to my Wii, but couldn't find it in the online catalogs.

So, being the kind of obsessive person I am, I just went to Amazon.co.uk and bought Guitar Hero 3.

It arrived 2 days ago. I opened it as soon as I saw it and tried to find the song. I couldn't find it. :( The problem is that even on Guitar Hero it's an Expert level song, so I think I'll have to work my way through other easier songs in order to unlock it. That means investing a lot of time to get to the Expert (4th and highest) level. I don't see that happening.

If I am going to invest that much time in unlocking that song, I might as well invest that time on my electric guitar. By the time I learn that song on the real guitar, it'd unlock loads of real songs for me in the process. So, why not?

I might play Guitar Hero, but mostly for fun when I am bored with other things.

So that's my story of trying to be a Guitar Hero. It's not finished yet...

Guitar Post - Ek haseena thi

I wanted to play this tune from the movie Karz for a long time, finally found the right (easy) tabs.

Guitar Post - Melody 1

Don't expect too much from this video, I am just learning. It's a melody from a Hindi movie. The song is called "Tujhe dekha to yeh jaana sanam".

My purpose in posting these (yes, I will post more) is not to torture my audience but to create a reference point, you know like "before" and "after"... because I AM learning and I WILL get better.

Enjoy!

I am back

So I am back from India. It was a good trip, longest I have had in a while- 4 whole weeks! But it was all fun.

Most importantly, I am free to write about the one topic that I had been keeping for surprise for my India trip - my guitar! I have been learning guitar for last few months and didn't want my kids to know that from my blog before they saw it in my hand.

That was done, and they were duly shocked and now I can continue to share my guitar-learning related experiences here, as and when.

More later...