As I was saying in my previous post, my daily routines now involve plotting the exercise in Guitar Pro and playing along my virtual friend (how sad that it has to come to this eh?). The rhythm was the same new one as yesterday and apparently you’re meant to play it in a “triplet feel 8th” manner, which is really hard to explain into words, I guess the simplest way would be have 2 8th notes play as if they were the first and last note in a triplet… I think that’s right. Anyway, as it was a bend exercise and yesterday’s exercise was also relatively bend heavy, my fingertips are now in “building armour – work in progress” mode.
The satisfaction from today really was the fact that at first it was a little tricky to catch on but once I had it under my fingers, it was reasonably easy to jump from one speed to the other. I had to force myself to stop on the very last tempo because it was getting a little messy and I don’t want to force myself to play if there’s a block. It’s best to take it back one step where it’s comfortable and try again on a faster tempo later.
Also following last week’s lesson I got a new backing track, very much in the style of Mark Knopfler and it feels strangely nice to play along. It’s a similar kind of oddness to the one which feels much like La Grange, though I’ve never been either a ZZ Top or Dire Straits fan, I can really dig some of their tunes and the groove that comes with it. Part of it is the comfortable zone they sit in where it’s neither too slow nor too fast, in many respects, metal / shred does feel very scary still but I’m sure that’ll change soon enough. Perhaps I should experiment with more Hendrix-like rhythms too 🙂