So this August, I was fortunate enough to be selected as a participant in a beginner’s guitar camp with 9 other students for a week. Music Centre Canada was gracious enough to provide us with guitars, picks, tuners and the works, free of charge. We were ready to conquer the week with our awesome instructor Danny B.
First I would like to make it clear, guitar is harder than it looks and any individual with small fingers is at a clear disadvantage – *cough me*. I clearly remember trying to play the g-major scale on the first day with extreme frustration. I soon learnt that playing the guitar in unison with even just two other people proved to be, well, quite interesting as well.
For the rest of the week, I managed to learn Knocking on Heaven’s Door by Bob Dylan, the Beatle’s song Hard Day’s Night and the guitar classic Smoke on the Water. Courtesey of one of the girls I was sharing a practice room with, I also can now play the intro to the Black Eyed Peas Song I gotta feeling and Taylor Swift’s Fearless. Although I could switch chords with about the effiency of a snail in the beginning, I found myself steadily improving over the course of the week. Barre chords proved to be my biggest challenge but I found that even those could be conquered.
Finally, at the end of the week, it was time to compose our own songs and present them in front of our peers. My group called ourselves The 
Three Acoustics (because we’re oh so original) and although all the presentations were rather slow going as we perservered through the basic seven chords which we had learnt all mashed into a song, it was all something we could laugh about and celebrate together. The biggest thing I learnt that week and consequently our motto was “never, ever, ever give up” (despite cut and bleeding fingers).
