Time for Something Fast

Hi readers. It's been a while but I do have some clips to go over in today's post.

While I still haven't been able to practice a whole lot, I am definitely starting to make some progress. The scale exercises I wrote about last week have definitely been helping my right and left hand dexterity.

Although the exercises and general playing have helped my stamina, it is still hard to play well for more than a half hour or so.

Anyways, let's move on to the first clip. This one is a retry of the first riffs I showed you guys. I think it's definitely an improvement rhythmically, although it isn't perfect. There is also a mistake on the very last part.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyFe312PmmE

The next clip was a tough one. It's a fast riff, from a song called Make Total Destroy by Periphery, that utilizes fret tapping as well as regular picking. There is a part that requires some fast string skipping, which is when you skip over strings rather than progress through them linearly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic-gSvERP0Y

In this clip, I played through the riff twice. Both were far from perfect, but the second one was a bit more accurate with the exception of the lick at about 0:34. I played it almost perfectly the first time at about 0:17.

The string skipping I was referring to was at about 0:04 and 0:24. Its definitely a fun part to play, but it's easy to pick the wrong string or miss altogether if you're not focused/well-practiced. With that said, I have had quite a bit of practice on this riff. It's just been a long time since I've played it.

As for the tapping parts, I definitely need to work on cleaning those up and being more consistent with my speed. Once I do that, I will just have to work on speeding up the rest of the parts a bit.

I will probably have another go at this riff in a week or two, so we can see if I'm able to make the improvements I mentioned above.

Thanks for checking in. See you next time.

Not a Right Hand Man... yet

http://www.unfinishedman.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/man-playing-guitar.jpg

Hello readers,

It's been a busy week, so unfortunately I haven't had enough practice to record any improved clips. However, I will talk about some of the current issues with my playing and the steps I am taking to improve.

My picking hand seems to be causing more issues than my other hand. The problems I'm having are keeping rhythm, controlling the strength of each pluck of a string, and syncing my picking with my left hand (which is a left and right hand issue).

I also can't pick nearly as fast as I used to be able to, but that will come with time.

The main problem affecting my rhythm is mostly endurance-related, so it should also improve without too much effort as I play more.

I notice that I start off playing more rhythmically precise, and it gets harder and harder to maintain as my hand gets tired. This is a problem for obvious reasons.

Controlling the strength of each pluck is more or less caused by the same problem. The reason this is an issue is because it hinders my ability to play riffs with the correct amount of punchiness and feel.

The problem with syncing my two hands causes me to pick too early or too late in relativity to my left hand's finger positioning. This throws off the whole flow of a riff and can cause more mistakes. In order to fix this I have spent some time just playing up and down scales. I do this slowly to start, and then faster as I get more comfortable.

If I just spend 10-15 minutes a day doing that, within a week or two I should see a great improvement in that area as well with my left hand accuracy and speed.

So I'll keep at that, and try to play more this week all together so we can have some clips in the next post.

Thanks for checking in. Talk to you again next week.

Fresh Strings and Fresh Starts

Hello readers. Today marks my first day playing guitar in over a year, and surprisingly it wasn't quite as bad as I was expecting. My fingers are a little raw after only about an hour of practicing, however, so I will definitely need some time to work my calluses back up.

For starters, I put new strings on my guitar for the occasion, which is always a slightly frustrating process. I did almost ruin my low E string (which is the thickest, lowest string for those who don't know) by not leaving enough slack for it to curl properly around the tuning knob.

But regardless, I got the job done and spent about 10 minutes tuning the new strings with an app on my Iphone. I used dropped C tuning for today's clip, and that is the tuning I will likely use in most of my videos.

So without further ado, here is the clip for this week. You'll notice my rhythm is definitely off but it was the only one I could get where I didn't blatantly mess up.

These are the first two riffs in a song called Mile Zero by Periphery. I used to jam this all of the time because its a fairly easy song for the type of music I like to play. It's very fun to play because it has a variety of chords and requires a lot of sliding up and down the neck of the guitar.

It took me about an hour of practicing to be able to play the riffs again. I did notice that once I got going it was easy to rely on muscle memory for most of the chords. The licks, on the other hand, I had to focus quite a bit to play at all.

I found myself trying to rely on muscle memory for the licks and consequently missing the fret I was aiming for or even missing the string all together. I could tell it was because I lack the dexterity and finger strength that I used to have.

On the bright side, I think this could be a positive in the long run. As I work on my finger strength and accuracy, I can try to improve my technique and possibly override some bad habits that may have been built into my muscle memory.

Okay, that's it for this week's post. Next week I will revisit this riff and hopefully have a much cleaner and more rhythmically stable clip to talk about. Depending on my progress throughout the week, I may throw another riff in with it.

Thanks for reading, see you sometime next week.