Guitar is Hard

It's not just you--despite its reputation for being a chill, down-to-earth instrument, the guitar is surprisingly hard. Let's commiserate and enumerate all the ways in which this instrument is a confusing pain. Don't worry though, by the end we will also discover what makes the guitar special and cool.

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// The iPhone App for visualizing the fretboard: Guitar Note Atlas, http://www.guitarnoteatlas.com

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Chris McQueen co-leads the band Forq and the acoustic guitar duo Read/McQueen, plays guitar in Snarky Puppy, Bokanté, and Banda Magda, arranges music, makes videos, builds music apps, and teaches private lessons. Go to https://www.chrismcqueen.com for more info.

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REFERENCES & CREDITS
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https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThreeChordsandtheTruth

"Three Chords and the Truth" song is by Chase Rice

Herbie Hancock photo: Columbia Records Publicity Photo, circa 1976 (Credit: Sony Music Archives)

Fur Elise (by Beethoven) by Beethoven Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported— CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Music provided by FreeMusic109 https://youtube.com/FreeMusic109

All other music is original unless it's obviously what it is. I forgot to caption the Dick Dale Misirlou clip toward the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIU0RMV_II8

Dude crushing it at Guitar Hero: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cHRfbiwdheg

Piano with only white keys — https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/instruments/piano/sinhakken-only-white-no-black-keys/

Just intonation vs. equal temperament chart simplified from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_equal_temperament#Comparison_of_historial_approximations_of_the_semitone

CAGED diagram from https://onlineguitarbooks.com
Matrix effect: https://youtu.be/u2oa5smqWHE
Lighting design heavily influenced by ContraPoints
Consulting and outro illustration by Erin McQueen (based on a photograph by Christian Thomas Hynes)

Видео Guitar is Hard канала Chris McQueen