Today I finally started to add the combinations played on the 1-12 frets instead of the 5th fret only and made a huge progress in the bass line for When I Come Around.
1234 exercise
I practice When I Come Around a lot so my guitar is tuned half step down to match the original. I forgot to tune it back up, but it doesn’t matter for these exercises anyway.
I decided that 5 minutes per combination is too much. At this point there are too much of them. So I reduced the time for 3 minutes per combination, so the time to practice all 6 of them were 18 minutes, which is ok.
Now I try to look away from the fretboard while playing to let my muscles do the job without using much brain power. Also to spice things up I tried to play 1243 on the whole neck today and it worked out … -ish.
1432 on the 5th fret
Played it at 300 bpm. I wasn’t too warmed up so the first half is pretty rough, but by the end of the video I got better. Still more practice needed.
1423 on the 5th fret
Played it at 300 bpm as well. There is a lot of movement here, definitely need some economy of motion for my left hand.
1342 on the 5th fret
Not so tricky, but when I looked away the fingers started playing the wrong things. Besides that I nailed it at 300 bpm.
1324 on the 5th fret
One of the easiest combinations but without my eyes on the fretboard sometimes I missed notes. So that’s a reason to practice more.
1243 on the 1-12 frets
I started trying to play new combination on the 1-12 frets from this one because that’s the second one I mastered after the 1234 variation itself. Considering the fact that I still struggle with it on the single fret, the whole neck exercise went not so smooth. But that’s a start! Did it at 300 bpm.
1234 on the 1-12 frets
Still trying to reduce the number of mistakes at 340 bpm.
When I Come Around
It was a day of bass practicing. I spent, like, 2 hours on the single bass line. The day before yesterday I figured out the way Mike Dirnt plays it and my enthusiasm way lower that ever because I thought it would be almost impossible to play it that way at the original speed in just a few days. I even skipped the bass practice yesterday because of that.
But luckily today I fully engaged in playing this bass line and surprisingly started to nail it much faster than I supposed I would do. So there are some progress videos. In the first one I played the main bass line at 80 bpm.
Then I played it around 10-15 minutes off-camera and achieved the original speed – 98 bpm.
Then I went to watch how the chorus part is played and found out that every 4th bar there is one note change in the bass line, so I had to reduce the speed significantly to implement this change – to 70 bpm.
After 10-15 more minutes of playing my left hand and my shoulder became so tired that I decided to film the progress and finish the practice for today. That was played at 80 bpm.
Summary
At first I didn’t have the mood to play and record stuff today. I even thought about stopping the daily uploads and instead to film the progress once a week. Then I realized it was because my routines had been repeating every day and nothings changed.
So today I had played every finger combination for 3 minutes instead of 2 of 5 and tried to make 1243 on the 1-12 work. Also with my huge bass wise project the desire to record and share this things appeared again, and I wasn’t as willing to write this post for some days now, so it’s a win!
Still need to practice the bass line more in order to maintain the speed and consistency to play full song non-stop at the original pace. I really want to record a full cover of it in the next 2 days and I will. I just won’t publish it on my channel and leave this version unlisted in order to record the cleaner version in some time.