It’s Thursday, it’s an odd week, it must be guitar night. Yay! Kicked off with 2 groovy backing tracks in G where I surprised myself to up the game a notch and feel rather confident about the licks I was coming up with. There is definitely something to be said about playing with other people and having a good sound off the amp. If only this was more of a regular feature, perhaps my progress would be more like a hare than a turtle. But, like the fable says, everything comes to those who care to wait. Afterwards we moved on to a last play of Parisienne Walkways where I managed to completely mess up the fast bit in the solo but no matter, it’s a great tune to work on at home.

Eventually we started up a new tune, back to Satch with The Mighty Turtle Head. It’s also quite groovy and it was nice to be able to manage the intro bit without too much trouble. The rest of it will be challenging, especially since it involves some thumb action and other finger positions I’m not too used to, but the rhythm should be quite helpful. I think seeing the challenges some of these tunes present, I’ve decided to go ahead and get myself a copy of Guitar Pro 6. It’s not a huge investment and it should be quite useful, especially since the sound engine is much better and realistic than it used to be and is therefore far more useful in terms of working with real music as opposed to midi sounds.

Once I got home, I dived in my daily exercise (arpeggios, which got challenging at 120bmp despite it being still just 8th notes like last week), and played over a few more Backing Tracks, though this time with a bit less agility. I’m not sure if it was because of the home environment, the fact that I was playing alone or because I was playing through headphones which made it more difficult. I actually think this was due to a faster tempo to begin with on the Backing Track so again, with time, it should get easier.