Skip to main content

Day One Hundred Sixty Two (Year Two)

First day of the new calendar year.  I opened at work today.  Here was the rotation of music that opened the store on New Year's Day

Dedicated - Steve Cropper
Torches - Foster The People
Zaz's selftitled record
Sigh No More - Mumford & Sons
Let Them Talk - Hugh Laurie

It was, I thought, a solid set to kick off the year.  Liked it so much that I played it twice.

I had vowed to do better with practicing and keeping track in 2012, and so tonight, I sat down with the electric, a sheet of essential chords and scales, and the timer that I bought last fall.

I ran pentatonics up and down the fretboard, playing the scale up and down at each fret, from the E minor pentatonic with open strings all the way up to the same scale at the 12th fret.  When I got to the 12th fret, I stayed there, and then worked my way back down.

After that, I played E position barre chords up from F at the first fret to the F that sits at the 12th.

Then, I switched back to scales and ran the blues scale up from the open strings to the 12th fret.  When I got there, I did exactly like I did with the pentatonics, and worked the blues scale all the way back down.

The above was intended to be just a warm-up to whatever was to come, but life interceded at that point, and I was unable to get back to the rock.  Still, going slow and careful (though I confess, I forgot to use a metronome), I still played for half an hour.  It wasn't enough of a warm-up, because my hand didn't feel as loose as I hoped when I finished, but then again, I forgot to stretch before I started, so that falls on me.

A bit slower start than I was hoping for in 2012, but it's a start.  A place to learn from.  A place to grow from.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day Two Hundred Twenty Seven (Year Two)

So, the new Springsteen disc is amazing.  There's enough of a mixture of his upbeat rockers, his ballads, and his message songs to make this his best record since The Rising .  And speaking of that record... Buying The Boss the day it comes out always takes me back to a specific moment in life.  It was July 30th, 2002, the year after 9/11, the year after someone on the streets of New York told Springsteen "we need you now."  I had driven to Oshkosh, WI to visit some friends, when I remembered that Springsteen's disc was scheduled to come out that day.  I drove downtown to The Exclusive Company, but had to park a few blocks back.  At the time, there wasn't much going on downtown, but when I got out of the car, I could hear this music coming from up the block somewhere.  The closer I got to Exclusive, the more it began to dawn on me, they had set up a giant set of speakers in their upstairs windows, and were blasting the new album out into the streets....
Post a Comment
Read more

Day Two Hundred Twenty Six (Year Four)

So I dove back into 100 Riffs tonight, going into it with the hope that the hand written tabs I did last night would help me unlock the issue I was having transitioning from the first half of the riff to the second half.  It worked.  With both halves clearly written in front of me, I was able to work through the transition that had been tripping me up when the screen cut off was happening on SoundSlice.  That's going to be a nice thing to have in my bag of tricks for the times when I get stumped figuring these things out. I played a little bit of acoustic tonight as well, trying to be better about finding the balance between both instruments.  Late 90's-early 2000's rock has come up a lot in conversations at work of late, so in that spirit, I picked a song from that time period out of my set list notebook ("Your Winter" by Sister Hazel), and took a quick look at it.  Admittedly, it's a song I had mostly learned a long time ago, so the essential parts of it w...
Post a Comment
Read more

Day Two Hundred Thirteen (Year Five)

Finally!  A really good day.  And one that I really needed after the frustration with the rest of the weekend. I took a step back from a few things today, and got what I hope will be a bit of clarity in the process.  Instead of worrying about the progress I really haven't been making on the EP, I told myself that I needed to be happy with the few bits of lyric I stumbled across today, and that maybe I needed to focus my attention elsewhere, at least for today. I had picked up a really cool book on music theory as it applies to guitar last Tuesday when I was out and about, and having spent a little bit of time paging through it over the last few days, I focused in on it tonight and started reading, taking notes, and reinforcing some things.  It felt like progress.  It was great. When I had worked through some of that, I moved on to the whole "100 Riffs" thing, and got myself moving on that again.  It's astounding how much I can get inside my own head a...
Post a Comment
Read more