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Day Two Hundred Fifty Nine (Year Two)

Spent some time with "Red House" today!  At first, I did it on my own, with nothing but the tablature that I have, and I took it intentionally slow.  I made a little progress that way, and it was admittedly nice to have a chance to try and get some of the licks under my fingers truly at my own speed.

After a while, however, I just got to the point where I felt like I wasn't picking it up well enough to make any justifiable progress.  It was at that point that I decided to break out the guitar trainer.  And what did I discover?  That, while it was sitting at the end of the table with my studio setup on it, the guitar trainer wasn't even plugged in!  Lots of good it did me that way.  Also, you can tell how often it had been used in the last, what, year?

Still, I got it plugged in and set up and dove back in.  Just the half-speed tracks that came with the Signature Licks book made things a lot easier.  I can only imagine how much easier things will be when I slow things down with the GT-1.  As a result, I've shifted things a bit more in the studio in an attempt to set up my tabletop music stand behind the GT-1, the theory being that it will be easier to practice if I can have the music in front of me when I can slow things down.

Even having used it for about a half an hour, it kills me that I've had this thing for as many years as I have, and have barely used it at all.  I looked online tonight, and apparently, if I can find the right cable at Guitar Center, I can run the unit through either my recording gear or my stereo, which would be great because then I'd be able to play along without being attached to a set of headphones at the end of a cable that's admittedly too short.  Shouldn't be too hard to find that cable, I hope.  I'll probably head over there on Monday sometime and see if I can't hunt one down.

I'll also admit that this may slow down my "one section/day" pledge, but that's okay if it gets me to learn the song better.  There were only a few spots in the intro that might need looping, though, and that wasn't even at the slowest speed, so there was encouraging news in that too.

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