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Guitar Practice Log – Going Loopy

Friday, January 7th, 2011

It’s been a while hasn’t it? But then there was the Holiday season and the horrible time before then which just takes you away from the important stuff that is playing the guitar. Alright so it wasn’t that bad, I’ve just not been able to play as much as I would like. Thankfully it’s now slowly coming back to normal.

I’m now on week 11 of the Guitar Aerobics program and it’s going pretty well so far. I’ve made some pretty radical decisions to really not overstretch it when I can definitely see my limits and I think it’s important to recognise the benefits of just the right amount of practice instead of trying to go the extra mile which might just break everything. What’s more is that I’m starting to find short licks I can apply to my playing that make things just a bit nicer and different so I’m hopeful that it will definitely have benefits in the long term.

Yesterday during our first lesson of the year I had a good chat with Mark about progress and basically what I discuss above and it made me realise how much beneficial it would be if only I could find people to play with. But I’ve mused on this before and I’m not really sure it’s the right time yet. Part of me feels like I ought to seize the opportunity when it presents itself with people I already know or people I’m likely to meet in the future rather than actively go seek out other musicians for the sole purpose of playing but we’ll see what it’s like in the upcoming months. I know if I wait until I feel that I’m ready to play with others, it’ll just never happen because I’ll always find some excuse to tell myself I’m not yet ready for it. Sometimes you just have to take the plunge. So folks, if you’re playing and live in Auld Reekie give me a shout. I can’t guarantee that I’ll be free having a family and all but I can keep an open diary :)

Anyway, we started looking at suspended chords, which are much easier to understand than I feared and sound pretty cool too. That too made me think about sitting down and working out my own chord progression I can then feed into Guitar Pro and play some solo over. I’m just not entirely sure where to start. This damn analytical mind of mine means I can’t simply pick up the guitar and start strumming, it doesn’t work like that for me, I have to sit down and work it out, then play it back and tweak it as I go, so it’s a longer process.

Finally, I’ve made some time to properly practice Mighty Turtle Head which I’ve been not so much ignoring but unable to find time for in the last month or two so it was nice to loop through the solo and just practice it at manageable speeds. It’ll take a while to get it faster but once it’s under my fingers I can just take it in steps and hopefully become more comfortable with it. Then perhaps I can go back to earlier tunes and do the same for parts I’ve never quite worked out properly.

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Guitar Practice Log – Finding Support

Thursday, November 25th, 2010

If my reckoning is right, it’s not 3 sessions I have to record, it’s 5 this time, so let’s try to be concise about them.

Last Saturday was my favourite session: legato, not so much because it’s the foundation of fast playing (I don’t think it is necessarily) but because it seems to be one of those things which come a little more easily. Not that I can reproduce that when jamming but as always I keep the faith that one day it will start to pay off. This time round I pushed myself a little, the exercise was quite straightforward and by the time I reached the final round at 120bpm, it still felt too slow for me to play so I kept pushing it in sections of 12 to see how fast I could play the exercise. I made it to 180bpm and decided to stop because of time, not because it was getting harder. I might have been able to reach 200 if it wasn’t for the fact that I don’t want to undo the things I try to train myself to do by breaking meaningless records when I’m not in my top shape to play accurately. But who knows, maybe next week.

On Sunday I didn’t practice for personal reasons so this got pushed to the following day. That rhythm exercise was reasonably easy and satisfactory to play but I found something interesting. As the exercise basically consisted of 4 ascending arpeggios to play while letting the strings ring at all times, my picking hand started to anchor itself to the scratch plate to make it easier to pick the arpeggios. Now I know it’s a standard way to play but despite having tried to play this way before, it always felt awkward. This time though, it was the most logical thing to do and made the picking easier and more relaxed, and thus easier to accelerate. This will probably only work in this circumstance but it was interesting nonetheless.

On to week 8 and there’s not so much to report on this week’s exercises so far. Playing with Guitar Pro does make it easier to reach the final 120bpm mark so I can really focus on tidying things like making sure extra strings don’t ring, adding some emphasis here and there for flourishing and so on. It makes the exercise more interesting and personal in some way. Finding ease in playing at certain speed over and over again is also very meditative in some way, you can focus on really being into the music, the repetition really reinforcing the concentration.

On today’s bend exercise I would say that although it helps to have supporting fingers to properly do a bend, once you reach certain speeds it just becomes too many fingers to move at once and so you can use the exercise to strengthen individual fingers so they can easily perform the bend without requiring support, a bit like having extra wheels when learning to cycle :)

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Guitar Practice Log – Virgin Zone

Friday, November 19th, 2010

You know, when I hear Steve Vai say, if you want to be successful, focus on your strength, I’m really tempted to just dump bothering with sweep picking and focus on something else like string skipping. Heck that’s what Paul Gilbert does and it serves him pretty well. Though he has an advantage over me: humongous fingers, so that’s that argument out of the window. In all seriousness, I don’t really know what my strengths are. Sure there are some types of techniques I can practice more easily than others but that’s not to say that it’s because I’m better at that technique than this technique, and if you want to be as wide a portfolio in your fingers as you need to play that music that’s dying to come out, you have to get all the trump cards.

As it happens, I’m getting a pretty good feeling about using Guitar Pro as an aide to my routine. Yesterday, I did an arpeggios exercise and it went down pretty well. This may be because it involved barring the cords with the ring finger which is somehow easier than using the index finger the way I was struggling a couple of weeks back. But really having this loop constantly going that you can leave at any time and rejoin when you’re ready is just what I needed.

In fact, I’m sure I spend more time on one particular tempo than I did when using the track on the CD. In a way that means more time spent on technique practice but in essence this could be anything. I could decide to practice an AC/DC riff and just loop it until I get it, don’t worry, I won’t shook you all night long just yet ;) Now today’s dreaded sweep picking exercise went down much better than I feared. Sure I didn’t get past 56bpm but I wasn’t expecting to even get that fast considering I was going for 8 groups of sextuplets within 2 bars. That’s 48 notes to play in total, not impossible obviously but one needs to have a pretty good grasp of the technique to pull that off. What I did notice though is new sore areas on my finger tips due to repeated play, almost as if it forces me to use an area of my finger I wasn’t really using before. Or you know, it could just be the repetition that was reaching its break point.

The point though is that I was feeling more confident and prepared to play that sweep picking exercise and I could even afford the luxury of focusing on not letting the notes ring too much. Ironically I noticed I was playing the F# diminished arpeggio wrong all those weeks, oops, but it took me almost no time to re-adjust which is telling me something.

I don’t know, maybe I’m having too high hopes but for now I’m enjoying the apparent progress :D

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Guitar Practice Log – Building Momentum

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

As I was saying in my previous post, my daily routines now involve plotting the exercise in Guitar Pro and playing along my virtual friend (how sad that it has to come to this eh?). The rhythm was the same new one as yesterday and apparently you’re meant to play it in a “triplet feel 8th” manner, which is really hard to explain into words, I guess the simplest way would be have 2 8th notes play as if they were the first and last note in a triplet… I think that’s right. Anyway, as it was a bend exercise and yesterday’s exercise was also relatively bend heavy, my fingertips are now in “building armour – work in progress” mode.

The satisfaction from today really was the fact that at first it was a little tricky to catch on but once I had it under my fingers, it was reasonably easy to jump from one speed to the other. I had to force myself to stop on the very last tempo because it was getting a little messy and I don’t want to force myself to play if there’s a block. It’s best to take it back one step where it’s comfortable and try again on a faster tempo later.

Also following last week’s lesson I got a new backing track, very much in the style of Mark Knopfler and it feels strangely nice to play along. It’s a similar kind of oddness to the one which feels much like La Grange, though I’ve never been either a ZZ Top or Dire Straits fan, I can really dig some of their tunes and the groove that comes with it. Part of it is the comfortable zone they sit in where it’s neither too slow nor too fast, in many respects, metal / shred does feel very scary still but I’m sure that’ll change soon enough. Perhaps I should experiment with more Hendrix-like rhythms too :)

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Guitar Practice Log – Stuck in a Loop

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

Once again I come to report 3 consecutive days of practice as each of them individually aren’t worth a post of their own. I guess practice tends to be like that, when you get keen on something new you found new perspective and things to ponder over but after a while it becomes a routine like everything else.

On Sunday the rhythm exercise was a little different from previous weeks as it involved adding flourishes to the chord progression. Well that wasn’t too bad until, again, I reached a certain tempo. You see, this chord progression though simple in nature G-D-C-G does involve a transition between C and G which has no pivot finger. And believe me transitioning chords at high speeds without anything to hold on to is difficult, regardless of how stupidly common those chords may be.

Yesterday the alternate picking exercise was similar to the one from the previous week, except it involved groups 16th notes instead of triplets. So of course that means more notes to the beat and as they all have to be picked, you find your limits pretty quickly. In my case I managed until 96bpm but beyond that my hands just weren’t responding. And that’s an interesting thing because although at this limit speed, things can get shaky depending on how focused you are, once you cross the line it’s like pulling the block too many in a game of Jenga, everything falls apart, quite literally.

So today when I was out thinking things through I decided to take a different approach to the daily practice and try to combine it with learning how to better use Guitar Pro by entering the lick in Guitar Pro and playing over it this way as opposed to over the provided drum loop which only lasts so long. Of course, today’s exercise was also over a new rhythm, which was interesting since it meant I had to figure out how to map that drum loop in GP6 as well. It took me a wee while to work it out, no thanks to the fact that I know virtually nothing about drums, what parts are called and so on, other than if you hit them hard, they make a lot of noise :) I got there in the end and was able to set out to practice with Guitar Pro at my own pace, which was great. Essentially it meant, not being stuck to a 90 seconds routine where you constantly try to work out how to play the lick over the drum loop. With the guitar playing with the RSE, it’s almost like you’ve got another player playing alongside never making a mistake. You can take a break, pick it up again when you’re ready, it’s brilliant :D The best part is, I managed to pace myself to play up to the final 160bpm loop, which I’m quite happy with, though as it involved a few bends, by fingertips don’t quite agree. If I keep going like that I’ll have scales on my fingers … pun intended :-P

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