I no longer remember the pain involved in learning the chords for the first few songs I learned on guitar—actually, I no longer remember breakfast this morning—but I know the process was troublesome. Even though I'd been through a fair amount of childhood music education, each experience involved learning certain notes or scales then playing them from sheet music. No time was spent teaching me the nature of music. You just read the score and played what someone else had printed there.

My childhood instruments included piano, violin, trumpet and trombone, in that order. None of these encouraged me to think of music has having any chordal structure. I'm sure it took me a year or two on the guitar to get to the place where I'd know the chord progressions just by hearing the melody.

As far as the requests here are concerned, Joe is certainly correct that the chords for most popular music are already on the Net somewhere, easily located using a search engine. The same might be said of technical help for computer users. We see the same technical questions over and over again, often from folks who've given no thought to security. They miss the fact that the Net is overflowing with sound solutions to these problems. Often they're even too lazy to search Mudcat for the many times we've already answered the same questions.

Still, I always try to answer when I can and in a polite way. If people become irritated by my answers, they'll also become irritated with Mudcat in general and I'd rather not see that happen.

      - Mark