Hi Richard, well i'm an older-ish guy also who's starting from scratch too. Dont read music but have played acoustic guitar (rather poorly) for about 5-6 years. Piano tho VERY different experience,
When I started to learn guitar it was all about muscle memory. That is... getting my fingers to go where I needed em to in the short space of time needed to play a recognisable tune. At first it was slow progress, and slow is good. slow means accurate.
I'm really liking the idea of assigning fingers to numbers on this system... I see a number and that finger gets to work... eventually
There are a couple of features that are our friend.
* Being able to slow down the tempo/speed by half
* using the auto repeat on any given difficult section.
* And bearing in mind that some days i'm better than others. Sometimes I come back to the section i've been working on and it's like i'm playing with my toes (I havent tried that session yet
) but after a short while i'm back and able to play again. so it seems muscle memory also has short term forgettery. Which is why slow practice slow practice and erm slow practice practice is key (no punn intended
) it seems
Oh one more thing i've found useful. I'm using my laptop (which sits on a rack above my keyboard) and I've found it better to click on the view tab and click on
'Full Screen' so that there is more room in the music notation screen. It wasn't an issue at first but when I got onto two handed palying the scrolling doen't quite happen quick enough for me to be able to see the bass note on the next line. In 'Full Screen' it pops up fine.
Addendum Just found out that there is a slidy notation sizing option on the toolbar... erm which you can also use
All the best with your practice..