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Day Forty One (Year Two)

So, I started today, working just on the playing side of things.  Picked two things off of the list of seven from yesterday, and dove in a little bit.  Started with "Red House."  Just worked my way through the intro a couple of times.  Oh boy is it easy to tell that my fingers are a bit rusty!  All this work with just chord progressions on acoustic has definitely strengthened my fingers, but hasn't done much good for my tab reading and my feel on the lead stuff.

There's going to be a lot of listening going on with these tracks as I get started here.  Enough that the notes start to slow down.  Along with that, I'm throwing each and every one of them into my guitar trainer, and slowing them down tempo-wise, so the notes fall underneath my fingers easier at first.  That thing really is a great way to go about learning songs with fast or tricky passages, and I don't use it nearly as often as I should.

After playing around with "Red House," I decided that I ought to take a detour through the Sister Hazel.  I didn't so much worry about the solo for "Wanted It To Be" tonight, though.  Instead, I focused on getting the progression under my fingers.  I surprised myself by adding in the chord extensions that they used without thinking about it.  Slowly but surely, my fingers are learning their way around.  I'm thinking that, once I learn the basic rhythm part, I might lay it down, just so I can solo over it.

Found something cool when I cracked open the Sister Hazel tab book as well.  It was a lead/scale sheet from one of the many times I started to take lessons.  This, I think, dates back about 8 years.  Crazy times... Wish I had been able to continue with lessons at that time, I remember that I was making great progress.  I just can't remember why the lessons stopped.  Something tells me the guy I was taking lessons from stopped teaching.  Sad, but fun to find the remnants of that time, and try to pick up the pieces again.

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