I’m starting to feel a little overwhelmed by the things I want to learn and the way I organise my practice. I’m now on week 17 of the Guitar Aerobics “programme” and a few things are starting to emerge as a result. Only there’s so much of it I’m not sure where to begin.
I guess the main thing is really identifying what I’m not terribly fond of, and it’s normally the arpeggios and sweep picking exercises. For the former, I think the main reason is just being tired of always playing along a Am C G Em chord progression, all the time. It just gets old. I get the point of the exercises and they’re very good warming up exercises (the last couple of weeks were anyway). But it’s previously been a pain to practice (literally), mostly because of awkward barred chords digging in my nerves. The sweep picking, I’ve ranted about it before. It’s my weakest point, I never manage to really practice it right and again, maybe it’s how it’s presented in the programme, but all you get to do is sequences devided in chunks of 7 weeks, where you do a chord progression in triads, first down, then up, then down adding either an octave or a 7th depending on the type of chord progression, then up again, then same again except you use legato and finally you put it all together in an impossible sequence of sextuplets. I’m not Rusty Cooley, this isn’t the sort of thing I want to play. So I do as much as I feel like doing, for the sake of doing it and then move on.
Now the question is, why bother? Steve Vai says, focus on your strengths, I guess I do that by simply spending more time on string skipping, legato, rhythm and so on. But should I just drop those techniques I don’t like? Wouldn’t it be crippling in some way? Guthrie Govan says he doesn’t like the word practice, as it’s got negative connotations to it. I can see his point, though in my environment, when you have no one to play with, practice is your friend. It keeps me sane, it keeps me hopeful that some day I’ll be able to stop practicing, and start playing.
My other issue is memorising things. I’ve now practiced 117 different licks, more or less every day for the last 20 weeks or so and there’s only a handful I could remember. The trouble is, I don’t have the time to revisit past exercises to commit them a little more to memory. I have to rely on my fingers and my ears remembering them to bring them to the surface next time I noodle along a backing track.
Speaking of which, and on a more positive note, I’m now starting to feel my music playing. I have this one backing track I spoke about before (I think), which is modelled on cheesy typical 80’s rock ballads, and I love it. It’s the one BT I can put on, switch to my heavily reverbed distorted mod and play something truly soulful as opposed to random notes along the pentatonic minor shapes. Anyone got tips for more BTs like this, please leave a comment. I really need to try to record something over this soon.
Finally, we started looking at various ways to play sus2 chords during the lesson and the sus2 power chords are really cool. Though I either hear Dream Theater or The Gathering whenever I play them. I guess that’s why they’re called “prog chords” 😉 Altogether I think until I can get my fingers to keep up with Metal speeds, my preferred style to play is some kind of Prog Bluesy Ballads 🙂