Posted by John Eddy

MUSC 158 – Beginning Guitar

MUSC 158 is a class that I took to partially fulfill the Aesthetic Expression pillar. This class was taught by Dr. Jaqueline Secoy. This class was entirely hands-on as a majority of our grade was dependent on us playing the guitar and showing our progression through various guitar techniques. Unlike MUSC 157, which I took in the Spring 2020 semester, I have experience in playing the guitar. I have been playing the guitar for around 5 years. However, I have never taken a formal guitar class/lesson. This class was ran very similarly to MUSC 157, where we had weekly video reflection assignments and we would write discussion posts about various musical qualities that we could identify in the video. Our midterm and final exams were very hands-on as they involved us playing the guitar and demonstrating the skills that we had been learning in class. Class time was devoted to learning new chord shapes and strumming patterns which we used to learn to play various different songs.

This being my first formal guitar class, I was pleasantly surprised at what I was able to learn. While I did not learn a ton of new techniques, I was able to use this class as an opportunity to clean up my technique on some basic chord progressions and strumming patterns that I did not put a lot of stock into when I was first learning them (ie keeping my right hand relaxed while strumming). This class gave me a new perspective on the process of learning a musical instrument as well as a new perspective on how to relearn things you thought you knew.

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Linked above is a Word document containing one of my discussion posts for MUSC 158. This discussion involved us listening to two episodes of the podcast Song Exploder, one was with the creators of the Stranger Things opening theme, and the other was one of our choosing (I chose an episode with Rivers Cuomo of Weezer). This assignment allowed us to see how successful musicians arranged their pieces. The creators of the Stranger Things intro and Riveres Cuomo have very different methods of song arranging and songwriting, which was interesting to see how that affected their sound and overall product.

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