Skip to main content

Day Sixty Eight (Year Four)

Got started on my 1 guitar lick/day for a year "project" today.  The licks focus on one of seven different areas of study (alternate picking, arpeggios, sweep picking, string skipping, legato, string bending, and rhythm guitar); and, not surprisingly, utilize each one of the areas of study on a different day.  The other cool thing about this book is that it gives you a frame of reference, not only for the topic you're focused on, but also the style of music that day's lick is best suited for (the musical styles include rock, blues, jazz, metal, country, and funk).  I'm sure that, after a while, some of the licks will become repetitive, but the cover of the book says it's good for "developing, improving, and maintaining" technique, so some repetition is likely going to be par for the course.

Spent the rest of my time in the studio tonight working on some scale & lead guitar lessons from one of the booklets that came with a Guitar World DVD.  Most of that was a series of licks that I had used previously but hadn't looked at in at least a month.  I'm feeling really good about where I'm sitting right now in terms of my progress since I moved into the studio.  Not feeling quite ready to start teaching again next weekend, but with free afternoons at least a couple of times this week, if I can put in a good amount of time each chance I get, I should be feeling more prepared by the time the weekend rolls around.

Got a chance to do some listening today, too.  Just being able to take a bit of time to stop and relax and listen to some of the stuff that just got put onto the ipod was nice.  Felt like it had been a long time since I'd gotten that kind of an opportunity.

Hopefully tomorrow will bring another good day!

Comments

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....

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...

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...