It’s the first day of the week 4 so I had a lot of enthusiasm to make some progress. I want to conclude beginner modules of the course this week, so I had much to do today.
1234 on the 1-12 frets
I started with the same 320 bpm as usual to improve my consistency at that speed.
1234 on the 5th fret
Then I practiced yesterday’s 1243 combination and added one more to get it to 300 bpm eventually.
1243
I repeated the exercise at 300 bpm. Still need to work on that muscle thing. More practice needed.
1324
Last time I practiced this the speed was 220 bpm. So today I set the metronome to 240 bpm to improve.
Chord transitions
I decided that there is no really need in practicing these at speeds faster than 150 bpm. So my goal with these is to get all of them to 150 bpm.
C/D transition
Did it at 120 bpm.
A/E transition
Practiced at 150 bpm. Done. The hardest part is to maintain this speed for 1.5 minutes straight.
A/Dm transition
Did it at 150 bpm as well. Not so natural but not so hard as well.
G/D transition
My brain started to mess with me at this one. The metronome was set to 150 bpm and the transitions themselves were not the issue. The problem was in me trying to mute the strings after each chord. It somehow messed up with my fingers and I started to press the wrong strings or press them at the wrong time. Maybe I’ll practice this one more just to figure this out.
B7/E transition
Played it at 80 bpm. These transitions are definitely became better but there’s a lot to do.
B7/C transition
80 bpm here as well.
Strumming
Module 6 pattern
I started with increasing the speed for module 6 strumming pdf. First I repeated it at 120 bpm.
Then I increased the speed to 140 bpm.
Module 7 pattern
There was finally time to check out the next strumming patterns file. I played it at 100 bpm line by line to get used to these patterns. Some of them were really unusual and tricky to play so I took my time.
Then there was time to play the whole PDF at once. I was’t really sure about it so I started with 60 bpm. And it was definitely the speed to start with 🙂
After a few attempts I increased the speed to 70 bpm. It was not perfectly clean, but still pretty decent. Tomorrow I’ll start with that speed.
Summary
New week – new horizons. That’s a great start and I hope that I’ll be able to keep the pace throughout the week. We’ll see!
I really want to play something more musical, not only routines. So I started to record The Kids Aren’t Alright by The Offspring off-camera. I recorded everything but the solo. It is not at the full speed of the song, and I still need to learn the solo, but it’s great that I finally started something like this.
