By the time Mudpedal flipped to the back third of his guitar book, something had changed.

He no longer felt like he was reading about music – he felt like he was doing it.

He could now play almost every chord in the book. He knew strumming patterns. He could recognize a G chord from across the room and didn’t even have to peek at the book to remember where to place his fingers for D major. He could play a dozen songs with his eyes closed. Well, mostly closed.

But now came something completely different.

Something intimidating.

Barre chords.

The page had diagrams with terrifying finger shapes and a huge red warning:

“Barre chords may cause muscle fatigue. Take breaks!”

Mudpedal swallowed hard.

Barre chords required his index finger to press down all six strings at once, across the same fret. Like a finger-capo made of skin and determination. Then, just to make it harder, he had to add his other three fingers in the shape of familiar chords – like E major or A minor – in addition to the barre.

The first time he tried, the strings laughed at him.

They buzzed. They clanked. They made rude noises.

His hand cramped up almost immediately.

“Owwww,” he groaned, shaking it out.

It was like trying to hold shut a sandwich stuffed with springs, pencils, and popsicle sticks.

“Dad!” he called. “These chords are impossible!”

His dad poked his head into the room, bass guitar slung over his shoulder like a sheriff’s rifle. “Barre chords? Oof. Yeah, those are the push-ups of guitar playing.”

“More like pull-your-muscles.”

His dad chuckled. “Keep at it. One day, you’ll do it without even thinking.”

Mudpedal wasn’t sure that day would ever come, but he wasn’t about to give up.

Each afternoon, he sat with his guitar and practiced pressing down with the side of his index finger, not the tip. His fingers turned red. His palm throbbed. But eventually, the sounds stopped buzzing. The chords started to ring out clear.

And then came the cool part.

Barre chords, it turned out, were like magic shape-shifters. Once he learned one barre chord – like the E-shaped major barre – he could slide it anywhere on the neck and play a whole new chord.

Fret five? That was an A chord.

Fret seven? B chord.

Fret one? F.

It was like one of those plastic stencil toys where the same shape could turn into a rocket, a dog, or a castle depending on where you moved it on the paper.

And then came a mind-bending realization:

A♯ and B♭ were the same note.

“Wait, what?” he said out loud, staring at his book.

He read the sentence three times: “A sharp (A♯) and B flat (B♭) are enharmonic equivalents—they are the same note.”

He rubbed his forehead. “Why do we need two names for the same thing?”

It made him feel like he was being tricked. Like in math class when his teacher asked if zero was a number or a concept.

He flipped ahead in the book. More music theory. More symbols.

There were ♯ symbols (his dad called them “hashtag notes”), ♭ symbols that looked like lowercase b’s, and the occasional ♮ – a natural sign that looked like a square-dancing L.

“They should just use regular words,” Mudpedal muttered.

His dad overheard and laughed from the hallway. “You sound like me in high school music class. None of it made sense until I heard it.”

That gave Mudpedal an idea.

He went online and started watching videos. Guitar tutorials, jam sessions, breakdowns of how certain songs worked. He especially liked the ones where the tablature scrolled across the screen as the musician played.

Tablature, or tab, as the cool people called it, was way easier than regular sheet music. Instead of strange symbols on five lines, tab had numbers on six lines, one for each guitar string. A “5” on the second line? That meant press the fifth fret on the B string. Easy.

No sharps. No flats. No weird keys to memorize. Just numbers.

Mudpedal liked numbers. Numbers were solid.

Though, he didn’t love the capo. One video made him change the tab numbers just because the guitarist used a capo on the second fret.

“Wait, now five is actually a three?” he asked the screen. “That’s nonsense.”

He decided right then and there: as long as he had barre chords, he didn’t need a capo.

At their next weekend practice, Mudpedal walked into Corky’s game room carrying a spiral notebook with their new official setlist.

“Guys,” he said, holding it up like a golden ticket. “We have enough songs for a full concert.”

Corky spun around on his drum throne. “No way.”

Mudpedal handed over the paper. “Half cover songs. Half originals. Alternating one-and-one.”

His dad pulled out his phone and started a stopwatch.

“Let’s run through them,” he said.

They played. And played. And played.

They only stopped for sips of Dr. Pepper and to tell Corky to quit drumming between songs.

When they finished, Mudpedal’s dad looked at the timer. “One hour, thirty-seven minutes. But if we trim the chatter and noodle breaks, that’s a clean ninety.”

Mudpedal beamed.

“We’re basically a real band now.”

That week, Mudpedal hit a new challenge: guitar solos.

He had learned the shapes for major and minor scales, both the short pentatonic version and the full ones. He practiced moving the shapes up and down the fretboard like puzzle pieces, matching them to the key of the song.

And that brought him to his nemesis, The Circle of Fifths.

It was a colorful poster his dad had found online and printed out. Mudpedal stuck it on his wall above his desk.

It had all the keys in a big ring, each one connected to its sharp or flat notes. It looked like a secret code or the combination lock on a wizard’s vault.

He understood what it meant, sort of. But not how to use it.

“How do I know the key of a song?” he asked his dad.

“Usually it’s the first or last chord,” his dad said. “Unless it’s blues. Then…who knows?”

Exactly. The blues song they played every weekend started and ended on an E chord, but the solo sounded best in the A scale.

“It’s like musical trickery!” Mudpedal moaned.

“It’s kind of like math,” his dad offered.

Mudpedal stuck out his tongue. “Exactly why I don’t like it.”

Still, he didn’t quit.

He spent hours trying to match scale patterns to chord progressions, writing down guesses, comparing them to YouTube comments, and testing them on his guitar. He practiced riffs in A minor, G major, D major, and even C♯ minor – which sounded a little haunted, like a ghost in a washing machine.

But the real magic trick he dreamed of? Playing what he heard in his head.

He knew great musicians did that. They didn’t need books or posters or even tabs. They heard a melody and their fingers just knew where to go.

So far, every song Mudpedal had written was based on chord progressions he’d already learned. The melodies came from the strumming rhythm or the way his voice naturally rose and fell. He hadn’t really written a solo yet.

Could he?

He took a break.

Sometimes, when your brain is scrambled like an omelet, you have to step away from the frying pan.

Instead of obsessing over the Circle of Fifths, Mudpedal started thinking about singers who played guitar, especially lead guitar. That seemed impossible. How could someone sing and play the fancy stuff at the same time?

He remembered the Led Zeppelin songs he’d listened to. Some had moments where the singer sang a line, then the guitar echoed it back like an answer. Call and response, his book had called it.

“You Shook Me” was one of those.

Mudpedal gave it a shot – but it needed slide guitar, which meant putting a glass or metal tube on your finger and gliding it across the strings like a car on ice. He didn’t have one of those yet. His mom told him to try using a smooth glue stick cap, which mostly made the guitar go squawk.

So he moved on.

“Black Dog.”

This was better. A snaky guitar riff followed by a break in the music – perfect for singing.

He practiced: play the riff, sing a line, play the riff again. It was like juggling. Or patting your head and rubbing your stomach while solving a riddle. It made his brain tangle up. But it was fun.

He also dug into Chuck Berry, who practically invented the idea of singing and soloing at the same time. His songs were fast, bouncy, and full of clever rhymes. Mudpedal learned “Johnny B. Goode,” though he kept forgetting the words halfway through.

And then there were the legends: Stevie Ray Vaughan. Jimi Hendrix.

They played lead, rhythm, and sang – all at once!

Mudpedal watched video after video, his mouth hanging open.

“How is that even possible?” he whispered.

It was like watching someone solve a Rubik’s Cube while balancing on a unicycle.

“Gonna take some work,” he said, cracking his knuckles and picking up his guitar.

And work he did.

He started small – two-note riffs between lyrics. Then three. Then a tiny solo at the end of the chorus. He wasn’t Stevie Ray Vaughan. Not yet. But every day, he got a little better.

And more importantly, every day, he believed a little more.