Day 8. Technique correction

Economy of motion

Here we go again… During the fretboard knowledge routine I noticed that I pull strings up instead of down. As I figured out from the comments to my week 1 report, the main pick movement on beats 1 and 3 should be downwards. Not to mention situations when you only play one note at a time – the pick should move downwards. So I started over with the first exercise of the course on economy of motion.

Fretboard knowledge

I started the training today with playing all notes on all strings a few times. Didn’t increase my record, but the main idea is to make it consistently fast from the beginning of exercise, not only after 10-20 attempts. The best time I got today is 2:36. It happened off-camera, so the video contains one of another tries.

1234 on the 5th fret

Technique correction

In the feedback for my first weekly report I learnt that my finger technique is not that great. Mostly because of my pinky – it flies away all the time when I play notes with other fingers. So I decided to start over to fix it.

The way I practiced was to keep all fingers on the strings all the time. If they are all on the strings, no one flies away. Sounds pretty easy, huh?

The exercise

It was really hard for me to make my fingers do what I wanted them to do. Somehow when I was moving upwards it felt almost natural, but moving down… When I tried releasing my ring finger from a string to move it to the next one either my pinky released too or the ring finger hardly moved. So I started at 80 bpm to try and make some progress.

Not gonna lie, I wasn’t too good at this, but I decided to increase the speed a bit just to make it less boring. And I pretty much nailed it.

Summary

It’s kinda sad to start over, but it’s good to fix those mistakes at the beginning, so guess I’ll stick with 1234 routine for a while now to do it properly. Hopefully in a few days I’ll be able to do it the right way at a solid pace.

Day 1. The Journey begins

Economy of motion

I’m quite experienced in pick usage, so just did it once for 3 min to be sure everything is OK.

Fretboard knowledge

To mark my starting point I used stopwatch to see how much time I need to find all 12 notes on each string.

I continued to practice fretboard knowledge string by string.

Summary

My mistake was to practice all strings at once. That’s why the results didn’t increase significantly. So now I’ll do this exercise on one-two strings by day.