Cwmwenallt Musings

For this second assessment, still haven’t got the recording side down yet, although I do now have a way of posting audio (see below). But progress is still being made, honest!

This week has been mostly drawn from material not on Justin’s website; so I'm not making a direct donation this week, but rather will be making an indirect contribution by buying his album from iTunes. Hope it makes the charts Justin!

Highlight this week was setting the metronome to 310 for alternate picking example #1 and more or less making it through 5 minutes. Still can't get above 100 on the metronome for example #2 though. One of the problems is that for the second one I still haven't got it memorised , and have to read it out of the book and that extra step seems to kill the fluidity. So I'll be keeping that exercise into next week.

I haven’t really done the root finding exercise this week. I know where they are, but hitting them quickly as a scale isn’t interesting enough to me as an exercise. So I’m also retiring this one until I find a more interesting way to cover this.
So, for this coming week, I’m going to try something a little different. I have a trip coming up to the US next week, so I may get the opportunity to hang out in a few guitar shops and ogle the merchandise (research for the ghettocaster project – honest), and it would be nice then to have a few more tunes under my fingers in case I get to try anything out.

So I’ve been doing a bit of research to come up with a couple of tracks that I like, which sound cool, but are still relatively within my scope to learn this week. And the first choice is ‘Dee’ by Randy Rhoads, which is a sweet little faux-classical tune, and I’ve always liked this piece.

The second choice is “Fall to pieces” by Velvet Revolver, which has a nice little picking intro and some heavier chordal sections and a slowish, but OK solo; and you can’t get much cooler than Slash as a modern day geetar-hero now can you. I never really liked the Gun’s n Roses stuff, so I havent really paid much attention to what he’s been up to, but I came across the transcription for this piece is in an old magazine I have whistl looking for the tab for Dee, so I thought I’d check it out (Oh the joy’s of a Zune subscription), and I quite like it; sounds quite ‘old school’ to me.

There are tab transcriptions of Dee out on the internet if you look, but they don’t really have the timing – for which you need classical ‘dot’ notation.

Teaching myself to read ‘proper’ music was another of those things I’ve been putting off forever, and this year I’m finally doing something about it as part of my learning to play drive. I got Notion 3 for my birthday and am still coming to grips with it but it seem’s like it does a pretty good job at playing and editing sheet music, as well as tablature. It certainly has its quirks in terms of usability, but I’m coming to really like it.

I also dug out a transcription of Dee from an old guitar mag I’ve been saving for this very occassion (see there is a point in me hording all that stuff up in the attic). I’ve used Notion to make a PDF of the transcription available. If anyone wants it as a Notion file or as a Music XML file, then let me know. I’ve also recorded it as an MP3 file straight out of Notion (well I also used a demo version of Guitar Rig too, I think its pretty cool although I rather over did the reverb…), see what you think.

So for the coming week the warm-up will remain the same, except for substituting the alternate picking exercise #2 for the pentatonic scale and trying to get the tempo up. Then the rest of the session I’ll be concentrating on an actual piece. Starting with Dee, and if I make good progress on that I'll try the same thing with some of the sections of the Slash piece.

So thats the assessment for this week, sorry the post's have been a bit thin on the ground; but getting back in the groove at work hasn't left a lot of free time, for noodling around. Hopefully will have the recording thing sussed for next week.
Hope your own practice is coming along,

Sean.

So last Sunday I began my new regime of paractice sessions, the idea being to dedicate an hour after breakfast to concentrated, timed practice. Well the good news is apart from a blip as I explained yesterday, I kept up the pratice sessions all week and made pretty good progress. So a small remuneration is on its way to Justin.

So what worked out and what didn’t?. Well the kitchen timer turned out to be a bit of a bust. It just didnt allow the accuracy I was looking for. And the battery ran out on my Pandora box, so I didnt have access to a metronome either, and since we are snowed in here I havent been able to get out to the music shop. So I whipped up a small application for the PC to handle both jobs. Its a bit rough and ready, but it did the job for me this week:

If you’d like to play with it, its available here

I haven’t figured out how to get recordings up onto the blog, so I didn’t bother with that this week; also since I wasn’t really happy with my performance in most of the exercises. The warmup is fine, but still struggling with fluidity in the spider and harmonics exercises; so the warmup will remain the same for the coming week except for upping the tempo in the pentatonic scale.

Warmup
Finger Gym 2 mins
Spider 2 mins
A minor pentatonic Scale (120bpm) – CTS p9, 2 mins
Harmonized C Major Scale – GS p7, 2mins
break – hand stretch 2 mins

The left hand exercises of finding the roots went fairly well, and I can find them pretty reliably now, so this weeks exercise is to play them up and down like a scale at a consistent tempo. Starting at 60bpm with an aim to get over 100bpm by the end of the week. And if that pan’s out I want to be able to play round the complete 12 tones using the cycle of 5ths.
Left Hand
5 root shapes exercise in C GFW – p8 5 mins
5 root shapes exercise in G 5 mins
break – breathing 2 mins

The alternating picking exercises were a bit of a mixed bag, the simple scale exercise was no problem; but the string skipping one I still havent got up to tempo, so this week I’m sticking with the same exercises but upping the tempo on the scale one. I also found it more effective to stick with each pattern for longer, rather than swap them about.

Right hand
Alternate picking 1; 120 bpm CG2 example 1.2 10 mins
Alternate picking 2; 80 bpm CG2 example 1.3 10 mins
break – shoulder stretch 2 mins

The listening exercise I found suprisingly challenging at first since what is being played is so simple, but I quickly got it and I’m bored of it now; so this week we’ll be moving onto tracks 3 to 6

Listening
ex 3, 4, 5 & 6 CTS p7&8 ex1 10 mins
break – breathing 2 mins

For the repertoire piece I’ve got the chords down pretty well, but I’m finger picking the piece rather than using Justin’s strumming; it sounds quite nice, but I want to give it a rest for a bit and come back to learn the strumming technique a bit later. So for this week I’ll be tackling something new. Unfortunately there aren’t that many songs on Justin’s site that I’m interested in; so this week I’ve cast my net a little wider. The piece for this week is Creole Belle, a lovely little song played in the style of Mississippi John Hurt by Stephan Grossman. Hurt was a great country blues player and well worth checking out if you havent come across his stuff before.
Repertoire
Creole Belle 5 mins

Stephan is a good teacher and an excellent player in his own right (see if you can find his live duet LP with John Renbourn which has some great playing on it), and he lays it out fairly well here and the chords are fairly basic; so not having the tab that accompanies this video shouldn’t be too much of a problem. But I may try and work out the tab as an exercise too.

So that’s this week’s plan, hope you are keeping your own plan going.

Keep on twanging,

Sean.

Today I started thinking about playing and a new approach to my practice. It is my goal to assign Sundays for continuous assessment and goal setting. Since I didn’t set any goals last Sunday, it being the festive season and all that; this first assessment will concentrate on explaining the routine and how I intend to apply it. Then I’ll lay out my actual practice schedule, should any of you want to follow along.
I’m going to be following my own practice routine, one hour per day after breakfast; but it’s going to be based around a bunch of books, and the excellent free tutorial site provided by Justin Sandercoe.

The books I’ll be using are: Chord Tone Soloing and Guitar Fretboard Workbook by Barrett Tagliarino (CTS & GFW ), Creative Guitar 2 by Guthrie Govan (CG2), and Guitar Secrets by Joe Satriani (GS). If you are intending to follow along, you might want to get a copy of these (I got a couple of them for my Birthday, thank you Alice – oh the power of Amazon Wishlists!). If you decide to get your own copies (which will be essential to follow along, as I’m not about breach copyright by posting them wholesale here), you should order them through the Amazon links on Justin’s website so that he’ll get a small kickback which will enable him to keep on posting.

Note that although as I stated in a previous post, I’m by no means a competent guitarist, I have got quite a bit of stuff under my belt already and although my skills are what you might call patchy, I’m not starting at ground zero here. If you want to follow along and you don’t know what an A chord or a major scale is, you’d probably be advised to work through Justin’s beginner’s course first. I won’t be covering basic chords and stuff, although I may well be incorporating some bits from that series too as revision for myself.

Each week I’ll be recording myself playing the exercises that I set on the previous Sunday and maybe even posting them here, those that don’t pass muster to my own ears will get carried over into the next weeks regime; those that I deem acceptable, or I’m just plain sick of, will be replaced by newer exercises (or old exercises for revision). The amount of success each week will determine the size of donation I will be providing to Justin! (your own conscience will dictate the size of any donation you’d like to make).

So the main feature of this regime, as recommended by both Barrett and Justin, is small bite size but intense sessions of 5 minutes each focussing on specific activities, interspersed by two minute rests over the course of about an hour. Barrett is quite insistent on this in fact, recommending using an egg timer to ensure you don’t run over; he gives a lot of justification in the intro to the chord tone book on why this discipline will keep you motivated, which I won’t repeat here but you can check it out for yourselves when you get the books. I think it sounds like excellent advice, and I have already co-opted our kitchen timer to try it out. The other essential piece of kit is a metronome. I have one built into my Korg Pandora unit but I may get a simple battery powered one as well, as some of the exercises involve working to a flashing light rather than a click track.
So, here is the first week’s study sheet.
Warmup
Finger Gym 2 mins
Spider 2 mins
A minor pentatonic Scale (60bpm) – CTS p9, 2 mins
Harmonized C Major Scale – GS p7, 2mins
break – hand stretch 2 mins
Left Hand
5 root shapes exercise in G GFW – p8 5 mins
5 root shapes exercise in A 5 mins
break – breathing 2 mins
Right hand
Alternate picking 1; 40 bpm CG2 example 1.2 5 mins
Alternate picking 2; 40 bpm CG2 example 1.3 5 mins
Alternate picking 1; 80 bpm 5 mins
Alternate picking 2; 80 bpm 5 mins
break – shoulder stretch 2 mins
Listening
Solo notes over A and D CTS p7 ex1 5 mins
Lead in’s to roots CTS p7 ex2 5 mins
break – breathing 2 mins
Repertoire
needle and the damage done 5 mins

So that’s the plan, see you next week for the first assessment.
As a postscript, I haven’t done any more work on the Ghettocaster after my resounding success with the chisel yesterday; but I did spend half an hour designing a headstock logo. Not sure if I’ll actually use it, but I thought you might like to see it anyway.

Toodle pip.
Sean.