It’s Thursday evening. The kids are in bed. My husband’s at church worship practice. I have the evening to myself. What do I do?

I grab something to drink, the remote and my guitar. I plop down on the couch and turn on reruns of something. I pick up the guitar- no pick for now- and I strum:

Am7…G…Am7…G…Am7…G

When I started guitar 3 months ago I knew it would be difficult. I assumed getting the chords to sound clear would be hard. (It is.) I assumed strum patterns would take practice. (It’s not so bad.) I assumed keeping an even tempo would take years of practice. (Stupid metronome.) But I didn’t realize how hard it would be to get my fingers from one chord to the next! It is so frustrating to sit down with a song I can play mostly well only to have to slow it down to half time just to get one transition.

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Hi my name is Ben McDonald. I’m 30 years old and just started taking guitar lessons at Jammin’ Music Studios with Joey Archer.

I’m amazed at how little I knew about playing guitar. I knew it would be tough but, wow! I was holding the pic wrong, the way I was holding the guitar was wrong, and of course as soon as he said “ok, your turn”, I totally botched the chords/song he was trying to teach me.

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