Antique Sunburst

That's the name of the color of my new guitar, as well as the title of my first pic for Melissa's natural light 325 project. Sorry Melissa, but I may have cheated a bit here. I actually took this with the internal iSight camera on my Mac, then I played around with it in iPhoto to make it look decent. To be fair, you DID say that the rules were just that you couldn't use a flash. I didn't use a flash, and I didn't touch the lights that were on in the room. I DID, however, crop, add saturation, warm the light temperature, reduce noise, add a bit of tint, up the exposure and increase the contrast.

That's what I've been doing tonight. I went and bought a guitar pick, a book and a tuner at Target - I was too scared to go in the Guitar Center or Musician's Warehouse or whatever because I always feel like I'm stupid in places like that where the employees LIVE that sort of stuff but I know nothing about it. It's the whole reason that I always try to help people the best way I can when I'm in the art supply store - there's a whole bunch of professional, expensive stuff, and it's overwhelming - the last thing I need is an employee making me feel like an idiot because I don't know something. Anyway, I came home and looked up a couple of websites and figured a few things out...like the fact that I remember NOTHING from when I played in my Creative Development class. I did finally get what I didn't seem to get when I did it last time - how exactly the fret board changes the pitch of whatever note/string you're playing. Sounds dumb, but when I actually figured out the physics of the fact that when you press down, the string gets shortened and produces a higher pitch than a bare string, I actually started to see what I was doing.

Anyway, I learned about that, then I attempted a few things until I got tired of it. I figured two chords out, and I practiced the damn things over and over and over and over. Baby steps. I can play them, but transitioning between them is next to impossible right now. I also am trying to figure out how to make my hand bigger - my hands are seemingly too small to play these things.

That's my music lesson for the day...hope y'all have a good night ;)