I wasn’t planning to practice for as long as I did tonight but I’m not going to complain because it was actually quite productive. First I set out to practice my daily exercise from Guitar Aerobics and today was bends. Well it was quite an effective session judging by the state of my fingertips :p I’m starting to really appreciate not only the benefits of each of the target techniques but also figuring out the proper timing of the riff. See the CD with the example only plays the lick once at a specific tempo, and so if you’re not used to slowing things down or speeding things up in your mind, it can be challenging to properly play the exercise at the right tempo. So for me it helps to do the mental one-and-two-and-three-and etc.. when you have a series of 8th notes for instance and really get the rhythm going in my head. Once I’ve done it two or three times, I don’t really need the mental metronome but it’s definitely good practice.
Later I jammed a bit on an Am blue backing track I have and I seemed to have picked just the right sound setting on the Zoom as it was almost a breeze playing though it. What I mean by that is how natural it felt to simply run along the pentatonic minor with a few added blue notes here and there. Sadly I didn’t record it, I should have but spent enough time setting up software today as it is, I really just wanted to play.
I also went back to Call of Kutlu as I was inspired to play some more Metallica after watching some licklibrary.com videos earlier this afternoon. Still much work is needed to pin down that solo but I’ll get there eventually.