All you are is learning

Pixie Frost · 01-26-2011, 02:23 AM

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*scurries* Well, if I lose, there’s always next year Tongue Also, Pixie’s a lefty—who knew? Also also, Skye could just return the guitar in our next thread. Pixie doesn’t need it for any of the threads in between. Word Count: 649

Pixie laughed darkly. “Well, I would, except I don’t have a house. Everyone has a room in Haven Manor where they sleep. I don’t know of anyone who sleeps somewhere else, especially not this time of year. There isn’t even a door to the inside of the manor that he can fit in, much less a room that he can stay in. And there aren’t that many other choices for shelter in the rest of the territory.” There was the cottage and the windmill, and that was about it. Both were not in the best state and wouldn’t do a good job keeping out the weather. “Hopefully we’ll get a stable built sometime soon.”

Listening intently, she wished she could write down notes of her own to remember all that Skye was teaching her, even though that, of course, made no sense. Some of the things she talked about, such as two letters coming together to create an entirely different sound, confused Pixie, but after asking a few questions she was able to understand it better. At Skye’s compliment, she smiled and rolled her eyes. “Let’s hope I’m a good teacher, too.”

Picking her guitar up, the musician laid the instrument in her lap. “The guitar works in a pretty simple way. You strum the strings like this with one hand…” She dug through her satchel and found a guitar pick, then glided it up and down the strings a few times. “…and with your other hand, you hold down the strings up on the neck of the guitar, which creates different notes and chords. See the lines on the neck? Those separate the frets—the sound of a string changes depending on which fret you hold the string down on. Generally I use my left hand to strum and right hand to hold down the strings, but I’ve heard of other guitarists playing it the other way. It all depends on what feels more comfortable to you.”

She went on to explain that learning how to play chords would be tedious at first because holding down the strings was difficult to get used to, and she warned Skye that calluses on her fingers from playing the instrument were not uncommon, but that once she got it, learning would be much smoother.. She also briefly explained hammer-ons, pull-offs, and bending the strings, telling her friend that she wouldn’t learn those until she had gotten through the basics. She even briefly showed her how to play a simple song that consisted of three chords, though she had difficulty explaining them, since she didn’t know the names of letters yet.

“The handbook I learned all this from called the different chords with letter names,” she explained, holding out the book to her. “Same with the names of the strings. Apparently they call musical notes by letters, too. I don’t know how to pronounce them, just what they look like. But here’s the three chords for this song.” She went to the page with the song on it and pointed to the A chord, the E chord, and the D chord. “I know that first one is ‘a’ because that was in ‘journal,’ right? But I don’t know how to say the other two.”

Smiling sheepishly at the other wolf, she continued, “You’ll have an advantage when it comes to learning the guitar over me, because you can actually read the book’s instructions and the lyrics to the song instead of just studying the diagrams. You can keep it if you want to study; it’ll be more useful to you than me. In fact…” Slowly, she lifted her guitar from her lap and held it out to her friend. “You’ll need this to practice. But be warned: I’ve never let anyone else borrow it before. So be careful with it—if you damage it in any way, I won’t easily forgive you.”

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