Guitar 2.0

I'm always intrigued to look at how profoundly the internet is changing so many aspects of our society. Here's a personal example of how it's changing the way I interact with my music.

Back in "the day," (late high school and college), I got into playing the guitar. After learning some fingerings from a few books, I was rockin' along to some favorite tracks. Actually, it was a labor intensive process. You see, there wasn't much sheet music out there for the latest albums I wanted to play. Also, what was out there was rather expensive. Not only was the sheet music expensive when you could find it, but they often included it in a songbook by the artist so to get the one song you needed to purchase the entire anthology of music by a particular band. This got real old, real fast for a starving student (ok, ok, I never went hungry, but that's another story...).

The least expensive way to be able to play the song was to listen to it, and by trial and error we'd grab the chords. I say we because it was tons easier when this process was done with another person to help refine the chords. The problem was that much of the music was still on tape, and fast forwarding to find that particular track, and then replaying the same spot took too much work as well. All in all, if I got to play more than one or two songs a week, I was doing really well.

I hadn't picked up a guitar in far too long. However, I realized that with the internet and my computer, this had gotten far easier. For the first step, getting some music notation, there are tons of sites where users publish the chords for a particular song. This week I've been playing with guitaretab.com. Looking on Google, it's easy to see that there are tons of sites that do this, and I won't be running out of things to play anytime soon.

The other key step is that now I don't have to deal with the cassette tapes anymore. With mp3's it's a lot easier to find a song and click play than to rummage through cases of tape, to then find that the tape wasn't rewound, and then to have to find song 3 of 6 on that side which could easily take a couple of minutes for each track selected, or even longer when I'd realize the missing tape was out in the car. No, this is now push button simple, and even more convenient. Of course, putting the tracks on an iPod would also be another simple option, and plugging it into a set of speakers, but I've been doing it from the desktop so far.

About the only thing that hasn't gotten easier is the actual playing. Does anyone know how to do an Am9 chord?

--Jonas