Big Trapeze

A year-and-a-half ago, I woke up Christmas morning to an acoustic guitar. This was my first guitar, meaning I’m only about twenty-years or more behind all the kids who received the same thing that year. I have a lot of catching up to do.

Since that time, I’ve bought the usual requisite of books any beginning guitarist would buy, including Guitars for Dummies, which I highly recommend. By now I know all the major chords, most of the minors, and even a few of the crazy Gadd9’s and F#m’s. My biggest problem is finding popular songs to play that are transcribed for newcomers like me.

There are many quality chord sites like Chordie.com (my previous favorite), Ulitmate-Guitar.com, and GuitarETab.com, but I finally found one suited just for me: PJ’s Guitar Chords. PJ has transcribed well over a thousand popular songs, and put them in chords that are easy for any beginning guitarist.

Just as an example, consider “The Scientist” by Coldplay. Most chord sites will have:

Dm           Bb                    F                        F9

Come up to meet you, tell you I'm sorry, you don't know how lovely you are

Where Dm, Bm, F, and F9 are fairly hard chords for beginning guitarists. PJ gives you another way to play it, and to my ear, it sounds just as great:

Em           C                     G                        G9

Come up to meet you, tell you I'm sorry, you don't know how lovely you are

Where Em, C, and G are three of the easiest chords on the guitar, even a non-guitarist could play the intro to “The Scientist” after 5 minutes study. My other favorite thing about this guitar chord site is that each song is formatted in plain-text, which means you can print out your favorites and not have to worry about chords jumping around the lyrics because HTML scrambled it on print (if you’ve tried to print from one of the other chord sites you know what I mean).

If you’re interested in more, check out PJ’s blog or jump straight to his chords at http://www.iol.ie/~murphypj.

For those of you having trouble knowing how to play certain chords, I always keep the guitar chords chart at 8notes.com handy.

I post this for three reasons. One, to let you know I’m alive. Two, because it really confused me when I read this, and I wanted to see if it was just me or the author. And three, because it’s really annoying to read this on a “professional” website.

This blurb was found on the Major League Baseball section of ESPN.com. Headlines are meant to be quickly skimmed and comprehended. We shouldn’t have to read a headline more than a couple of times before we understand the point of the story. Read the offending headline highlighted below, and see how long it takes for you to figure out what it’s talking about.

“Rookie called up after kneecap KO’s 2nd Reds SS.”

Maybe it’s just me, but it took me three reads to figure out that a “rookie short-stop was called up from the minor leagues after two previous short-stops for the Cincinnati Reds had suffered knee-cap injuries.” Granted, that’s a lot to say in 10 words or less, but I think “Kneecap injury sidelines second Reds SS | Rookie called up” would have been better.

If you’re from another country that knows nothing about baseball, you probably wouldn’t be on this site–but if by mistake you had stumbled upon it, you would have no idea what that statement meant. You could look at the other headlines around it and easily infer what was going on with them. Maybe mixing two abbreviations (KO’s and SS) should be a no-no when writing headlines.

Yes, I have more important things to do with my time than to rant on ill-formed headlines, but for the sake of humanity I couldn’t help myself.