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.