Vsevolod Kolos

Hey guitar chefs!

This week – Dorian mode. I’ve been improvising almost daily, listening back to what I’ve recorded and choosing the best takes for todays video.

After the 2nd day there was a livestream and then the Rendez’s comment with suggestions to focus more on the arpeggios instead of the whole scale shape. I’m not sure if I’ve implemented these suggestions correctly, but since Day 3 I tried to construct my improvs around the notes that are in the chord I’ve been playing over.

It changed the game partially, but I started to overthink a lot, so the closer to the end of the week I got, the less of the “successful” takes I managed to find in my improvisation sessions. I’ll stick to this approach though. Maybe I just need more practice and getting more comfortable with the notes I should stick to.

As for daily riffs, I’m not sure if I’m going to do them in 2022. I want to learn and record some harder songs, and it’s gonna be impossible to learn and record things like this in one day. So maybe I’ll record one full song per week or even per month instead of playing those short parts on a daily basis. We’ll see…

Anyway, Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates it on December 25th. Have a nice one! I’ll see you in a week.

Hey guitar chefs!

So I decided to do one mode per week for my improv practice, and this week was completely on C Ionian. I would improvise for 10 minutes per day. First 5 minutes over the metronome in order not to get restricted by the backing track and then another 5 minutes over the backing track.

It’s not much, but that amount of time is bearable when it comes to listening back to the improv and cutting it down for my daily posts. If I play for 10-20 minutes, it takes nearly an hour or maybe even two to edit everything out, which is too much. So I went for quality over quantity ?

Next week – Dorian Mode!

As for the riffs, I focused on the vocal melodies instead of pure riffs and solos. The idea was to become better in improvising through learning and feeling these melodies. And I think it started working out slowly but surely. My improv is still very repetitive but sometimes I come up with something more unique. And I think that learning vocal melodies helped with that progress. So yes, I’ll continue learning these for sure ?

See you next week guitar chefs!

Hey guitar chefs!

This week the craziness of life continued, so I had nearly no time to practice improvs and barely any time to record the daily riffs. So the video is almost completely devoted to them. Enjoy!

I’ve improvised 2-3 times this week, but my rhythms are very repetitive, so I didn’t even insert any take in my weekly video. Hopefully I’ll be able to come up with something next week and record something decent for this part.

In order to boost my melody creation creativity I decided to learn by ear and play the vocal lines for the songs I chose for the riffs. Hope it helps…

See you next week!

Well, that week was a really busy one. Haven’t got a chance to practice anything but Cliffs Of Dover, and ofter would play it at 1-2 a.m. which affected my performance. So I’m not happy with the results, but I’ll leave this tune for a while, because it’s getting very repetitive at this point.

I hope to do some improvising next week. Fingers crossed ??

Have a nice week, guitar chefs!

Hey guitar chefs!

This week I’ve had time only to practice Cliffs Of Dover. And I’ve been drilling it daily starting from 150 bpm and gradually going up to 180 bpm. So I decided to record it at each tempo I’ve gone through: 150, 160, 170, 180 bpm. And after doing so I thought: “Maybe it’s time to try to play the song at the original tempo?”. So I tried it and recorded the initial 5 minutes right away.

Surprisingly, it worked out, so for the next week I’ll be cleaning it up at that tempo. There’s still things I need to focus on more, like muting the D string more consistently and precisely, but I really like the result at this point. And it’s so much fun to play, even after pretty much the week of doing it over and over and over again for 10 minutes a day. Looking forward to what I’ll have achieved by the end of the next week.

I’ve added another 80-90 songs which I want to make a short covers of to my playlist, which is cool, because I’ve almost run out of them and had to quickly find some to learn straight away. Also, I try to learn the ones which sound easy by ear and only double check myself with the tabs if I can’t figure them out or the end result sounds wrong.

P.S. Trying to make my videos more dynamic and “more playing, less talking”, so this one is short. Hopefully it’ll be enjoyable to watch.

Hey, guitar chefs!

Improvisation… The idea was to do an improv session each day. 7 modes = 7 days, everything makes sense. But in reality I had time for these sessions only 3 times. So for this week I’ve got only Ionian, Dorian and Phrygian improvs, which is not too shabby but less than I wanted to practice. Next week will possibly be even more busy, so we’ll see how it goes. Maybe I’ll have to postpone this routine for another week. Black Friday is soon, lots of stuff needs to be done!

Cliffs Of Dover. Increased the tempo to 150 bpm, have been playing at it pretty much the whole week, still inconsistent as hell ? More practice needed!

As for the riffs, I really like almost every one of them and listen to them pretty much daily. The tone is great, the performance too (I hope). My favorite is Stolen Dance by Milky Chance. I’ve listened to it like 100 times already 😀

Anyway, have a nice week, guys. See ya!

Hey guitar chefs!

This week I’ve completely annihilated my sleep schedule because of lots of stuff that’s going on in the life now. So I had to practice 5 of 7 days after midnight and sleep for 3-5 hours per day. Hence my performance is sloppy, but I still managed to somehow play the exercises at 150 bpm.

Also I really liked the part of Cliffs of Dover, so I learnt it 🙂

And there’s no way I could maintain the daily riffs challenge learning everything by ear, so I’ll switch to the tabs from now on. The positive side of it is that I’ll be able to learn something much harder than I could by ear in one day.

I want to sleep and I need some sleep, so I’m gonna go to sleep now 😀

Cheers!

Hey guitar chefs!

This week I continued practicing sweeping G major scale. That’s a task and a half for sure! Before that I’ve always managed to reach my “standard” tempo of 150 bpm in a week, but with this exercise I only got to 120 bpm in two! That’s crazy, but surely I’ll get there in a week or two if the practice continues. I got a bit tired of it but we’ll see – maybe I’ll give another week a shot.

As for the riffs, the ones I chose for this week are pretty tricky at most, which is cool. Especially if I haven’t made any mistakes in them ?

Anyway, the next week will be on either the sweeps or the next module. See you there!

Hey guitar chefs!

This week I continued my sweep picking practice. Sweeping the scales appeared to be much harder than sweeping one single arpeggio, so the progress is not huge in the terms of speed, but it’s still very noticeable. I started and ended playing 1/8 notes @ 100 bpm, and despite the fact that I still make mistakes at almost every line, the number of them is MUCH lower than before, and I’m quite happy about it.

I’ve got a lot more work to put into these exercises before they’ll sound good enough for me to call them a success. So the next week or two will be devoted to this exercise in order to achieve that.

And the grand news: It’s been 2 or 3 weeks of waiting, but I’ve finally got it! PRS S2 Standard 22 Satin Antique White. My Epiphone went straight under the bed as soon as I’d brought this beauty home 🙂 I’m very happy that I decided to return the vintage sunburst one. This guitar suits me and represents my character much better, the previous one was way too bright and colorful.

See you next week. Take care!

Hey guitar chefs!

Well, it’s happened. Now I’m 52 weeks in the daily guitar practice. I’m not sure what to feel, because, as other chefs mentioned, when you do something on a daily basis, it becomes a habit, so after reaching another milestone you just continue without having any thoughts to celebrate 🙂

Thanks Brandon for creating this masterpiece of a program. I don’t even know who one needs to be in order to go through all modules in 52 weeks – that’s just impossible! And that’s a good thing – it shows that there’s a lot of stuff that’s to be learnt in the future weeks, months and possibly even years.

Thanks Caio for your constant feedback, which is always on point and helps out big time. Without it the experience would be completely different. And also Happy birthday! I devoted a part of the video to that 🙂

Thanks everyone for the support and comments on my videos. Michal, Michal, Rendez, Steven, Michael, John. It’s very nice and you’ve helped me a lot during this year.

I’m planning on recording the proper before/after video/testimonial in a few weeks after I have finally bought a new guitar. That’s just the regular type of weekly update. Enjoy watching!