But since pride is a sin, I'll probably get b****-slapped down. :roll:
Anyway, last night in about two hours I knocked out learning two songs... White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane; and Someone's Knocking, Terry Gibbs. OK, I can't play them well, but I got the chords and structure down. They're not hard at all.
For White Rabbit my biggest project is the guitar solo intro, but a lot of Youtube covers playing with the recording omit it, just playing the F# and G with the bass and drums, then the chords of the song. Which I might add, follow the pattern of the drums. The song is based on a Spanish bolero.
I discovered that the intro of Someone's Knocking seems to be a Bm7, hammer on the A string, then Bm. x04432 x24432.
This is what I'm running into... I'm amassing a collection of songs I know how to play, but can't play well because there is so much to practice and so little time. And then there are those I like and want to play, but maybe have bitten off more than I can chew with them.
It is difficult to answer when one does not understand the question.
Nothing sinful about being proud of your accomplishments, Frank - enjoy the buzz! You're the same age as me, and I'm not too old to get a big kick out of achieving something I couldn't previously manage. When you've been trying for ages to get something right, then suddenly it all clicks into place....hey, it's a great feeling!
Oh, and as Noteboat recently said in another thread - make sure some of your (structured!) practise time is spent reviewing things you already know, and some of that time's set aside for fun - playing the things you REALLY want to play!
:D :D :D
Vic
"Sometimes the beauty of music can help us all find strength to deal with all the curves life can throw us." (D. Hodge.)
Oh, and as Noteboat recently said in another thread - make sure some of your (structured!) practise time is spent reviewing things you already know, and some of that time's set aside for fun - playing the things you REALLY want to play!
:D :D :D
Vic
That's a problem I have. I don't work on the older stuff. Then when I pick it up again, I'm really rusty. It's a bad habit to say "OK, I made that conquest time to move on". There's no reason, other having gotten into a "groove" that I can't go out on the deck or in the back yard in the shade with a few song sheets, the guitar and music stand and play a little. It's not all about continually learning new stuff.
It is difficult to answer when one does not understand the question.
Frank your not alone in that I do it all the time but I think that it's the thrill of learning a song that I'm more into than anything else.
Don't get me wrong I like to play too but once I have a song down there are still only a few that I really enjoy playing and I never know what song that might be. Many times it's not songs that I have loved all my life in fact most of the songs I like to play are songs that either I was never a fan of or never really heard before.
Most have to be pretty faster paced. Slow songs for the most part bore me.
"It's all about stickin it to the man!"
It's a long way to the top if you want to rock n roll!
Yeah, as much as I like all the songs in my song book, that's why they're there, I think what happened is that the earlier ones took me so long to learn that I got sick of playing them. I like the faster rhythmic ones too. That's why I'm all about rhythm, either guitar or bass.
It is difficult to answer when one does not understand the question.
Yea Frank I know all about those early ones. Take months to get them down and by that time I don't even want to hear any of them let alone play them. But no one warned me about that..Ha.
If I knew that those first few would take so long and I'd get sick of them in the process I would have learned songs I never liked in the first place!
But that is the one thing that stands out for me at least in my evolution to become a real player and that is learning songs take sooo much less time now, usually a matter of hours rather than months and Vic is right any accomplishment us old guys make is a good thing
"It's all about stickin it to the man!"
It's a long way to the top if you want to rock n roll!
Yea Frank I know all about those early ones. Take months to get them down and by that time I don't even want to hear any of them let alone play them. But no one warned me about that..Ha.
If I knew that those first few would take so long and I'd get sick of them in the process I would have learned songs I never liked in the first place!
But that is the one thing that stands out for me at least in my evolution to become a real player and that is learning songs take sooo much less time now, usually a matter of hours rather than months and Vic is right any accomplishment us old guys make is a good thing
I'm glad I'm not the only one! :lol:
It is difficult to answer when one does not understand the question.
I think we're in the same boat, MIno. I know a bunch of songs, but precious few are note for note. I've been getting better at learning some song detail. However, to me, there's nothing quite like kicking my feet up, strumming away some song in my head and/or on a chord sheet in front of me. I guess it just matters what mood I'm in.
Having said all that, it is a good bit of fun to pick up a song and learn it in quick fashion, even if it's in it's simplest form. I remember learning White Rabbit. It was one of those songs that I had slipped into my try later folder and failed many times at. And then one day, I got it. I think there's actually a good version in one of those Guitar White Pages books we talked about. Good fun.
Roy
"I wonder if a composer ever intentionally composed a piece that was physically impossible to play and stuck it away to be found years later after his death, knowing it would forever drive perfectionist musicians crazy." - George Carlin
It was one of those songs that I had slipped into my try later folder and failed many times at. And then one day, I got it. I think there's actually a good version in one of those Guitar White Pages books we talked about. Good fun.
I don't know what made me think it was so difficult. It's not. Especially when you compare the tabs of the guitar intro to the standard notation. Reading the notes is so much less "overthought" than the tabs. And yes, it's in Guitar White Pages, I think Vol. III.
It is difficult to answer when one does not understand the question.
That's a problem I have. I don't work on the older stuff. Then when I pick it up again, I'm really rusty. It's a bad habit to say "OK, I made that conquest time to move on".
Just as an anecdote to bear in mind...
Giant Steps by John Coltrane is considered something of a milestone in jazz. Jazzers often ask Q's like "when will I be able to solo over GS?" - it's seen as a big achievement. John Coltrane himself, revered as he was, spent over a year practicing soloing over the chords to Giant Steps before he ever performed it at a gig or in a recording studio. It was another year or so later before he said he was starting to get to grips with playing over those chord. After having practiced doing just that for a couple of years. One set of chord changes. A lot of jazzers who ask the Q about when will they be able to solo over GS seem to forget that.
Don't be afraid to spend long periods of time on just one or two songs. And don't be afraid to return to songs once you've learned them. Provided you don't just breeze through the changes but instead stay aware of what you're doing and focussed on giving the best performance you can, sometimes you can develop more/better by going over 'old material' than by learning new stuff. Progress looks easier to measure when you say "I've learned 100 songs this year" than when you say "I've mastered ten songs this year," but the perceptive listener will notice the difference in quality.
Juts a little food for thought, and one I have to keep reminding myself of at times.
Wow Scrybe excellent post which leads me to a post hijack..sorry Frank.
Most of you know my situation and the terrible loss we had a week or so ago. Well the band (the 3 of us) got together to play again on Friday and it was so-so at best.
There are a couple obvious things that are going to force us into a new direction or shut us down.
1.) Justin was the best musicain and sang many of the songs and it will be impossible to duplicate without at least another guitar player/singer.
2.) I am not qualified to front a power trio even if we could sing all the songs
3.) The bass player is no better than me and with the two guitars alot of times it didn't matter as much what he was playing since we play pretty loud and you really would never notice but now that Justin's guitar is not there is obvious we are missing something.
But the most glaring thing I see in my own playing and I've known this for awhile is that I'm kind of a sloppy player and Scrybes little post about the jazz song really hits home. I've been trying to rush to learn something new all the time yet the stuff I do know is not all perfection and even if I can play all the songs I know very few would stand out.
Now I'm a bit of the shy type and never really wanted to be a frontman or anything but I'm not sure what it will take for me to polish up my repetiore. I do work on these things sometimes for days and many times with what seems like little to no improvement.
So this whole situation has really made me think about my abilities and how muchmore I want to put into this.
I've known for a long time that the way I use my teacher is pretty worthless. He basically just tabs songs out for me to play and yes we will go over stuff that I find difficult but I am not learning to be a musician.
I know I'm pretty stubborn and have poo - poohed some things as being unnecessary for what I want to do but I'm thinking there are definitely things i should be working on rather than banging out a new tab every week.
We have been working on 3 string Dom 7th chords on the different strings and working to incorporate them into soloing and the different minor pent positions they fall under but that has been slow going to make any improvements to my soloing.
So I guess I'm in one of those mid-guitar life crisis wondering what I should be doing to improve my ability.
"It's all about stickin it to the man!"
It's a long way to the top if you want to rock n roll!
Thanks, cnev. Just to clarify, a couple of points I failed to mention in my post above...
* Coltrane practiced that one set of changes daily for that couple of years.
* Also, by the time he started working on GS, he was already considered a master musician, he'd done Kind of Blue with Miles Davis, he'd recorded a bunch of major albums himself (I think GS was post-A Love Supreme, tho I'm not sure). He was already well-established as the premier tenor sax player in jazz. But he didn't just think, "oh, I'm JC and I'm one of the top musicians in the world, so I'll just blow through it at the gig and I'm sure I can get through it ok."
I'm not saying everyone who picks up a musical instrument has to practice around the clock like Coltrane did. He was more than a bit obsessed with practicing his horn. But the results of his work paid off. All those guys who have amazing control over their instrument have put in countless hours and made sure they've truly mastered each thing they learn. Even if we don't go quite as far as they do, it's worth bearing in mind before trying to learn a ton of stuff to only 60% and nothing to 100%.
One of the things that really impresses me with Joe Hempel's playing, from what I've heard....he doesn't play anything that makes me go "wow, that's amazing/difficult/complicated/requires magical talent", but everything I've heard him play, he's played it as well as it could be played. It may be simple stuff, but it sounds as musical as it is possible for, well, for music to get. That makes it easy for me to listen to him playing. It sounds good. It impresses me greatly that he has that mindset and, I'm fairly convinced, if he sticks with guitar playing, he'll be one of the best players on GN soon enough, simply because of his approach - when he comes to tackling harder material, he'll have set all the right foundations in place, and so he'll find it easier than another player who skipped on those foundations. It's one of the risks of being self-taught and highly impatient, as I have largely been, that I keep finding holes in my "music mastery". Sometimes, those holes are just plain laziness and switching off when I should be paying more attention. So, props to Joe for being a role model, in that sense.
Cnev - if I can help/advise in any way, let me know what/where you want to improve, and I'll try.
Yes Scrybe I hear you and I definitely agree with everything you said about Joe he does make everything sound good. Now I think Joe and I put Al Mann in that category too, have a little more "natural" talent than I do and I'm sure I am definitely more impatient then they are but that's no excuse I'm not really playing difficult stuff.
I'm not sure exactly what I need to be doing at this point. When I have a lesson that involves just learning a new song we'll tab it out and then I will go home and work on it. These are all classic rock songs for the most part and very few are very technically difficult so I rarely have questions about performing them for my instructor. At this point it only takes a day or towo at most to get these songs down to where I can play along with a CD but they may not be 'perfect" in that I might mute a string here or there etc. so they aren't really polished and that's where I want to get to. I will work on those parts over and over with sometimes little results. I'll start slow and work my way up to performance speed but then I never seem to get to the ultimate level.
"It's all about stickin it to the man!"
It's a long way to the top if you want to rock n roll!
When you get the songs to performance level, do you feel like you're playing at the edge of your ability? Bear in mind, like in the JC example I mentioned, when you see guys playing tunes comfortably on stage, it is usually because they've developed that comfort with the tunes over time. Chances are, the stuff that you hear at a gig is between 40-90% someone's 'true maximum' for want of a better phrase, depending on who you go to see (obv, Seasick Steve gigs closer to his max ability than, say, someone as refined as Tommy Emmanuel).
You might benefit from trying some more challenging pieces or exercises to develop your fingers so that the songs you play feel more comfortable for you. One of the benefits of doing chromatic finger drills and/or scales is that your fingers do develop much greater independence and, because you are repeating patterns a lot of the time (e.g. everything is a steady rhythm, often the same number of notes per string), you can focus on maintaining good tone. That gives you more confidence when it comes to playing songs.
It might also be that you don't know the songs as well as you need to know them for it all to sound comfortable (e.g. are you trying to remember what comes next when you play them? or are there moments in a song that make you nervous because it's hard? feeling apprehensive before playing a line can force mistakes when you come to play it).
You might also want to try this on one new song - learn it, but learn it bar by bar. Only learn 1-4 bars at a time, and make sure they're perfect before moving on to the next 1-4 bars. Then, make sure you can play those 4-8 bars perfectly, before adding another 1-4 bars. And so on. The idea here is to not think you can do something perfectly because you've done it perfectly once - you need to be able to perform those 1-4 bars perfectly 15 or 20 times consecutively with no mistakes for it to be considered mastered and you move on to the next section.
What does your teacher think? I'm speaking purely from personal, uh, philosophy here, but I've always thought the job of a teacher isn't to teach me facts or specific lines/chords/songs/etc, but to help me to develop the tools to be able to play a song/read a book/etc on my own. The goal is for me to get to a point where I no longer need them. I tend to feel this way about teaching in general. Perhaps your teacher feels happy with your progress because he/she's giving you new songs to learn regularly and isn't sufficiently invested in your growth as a musician to spot the faults in your playing that are making you feel self-conscious? I had lessons briefly in my teens and stopped them for this reason - I only returned to lessons recently because I found a teacher who was invested in my progress. Just a thought.
Hope some of this helps. It's a bit hard to call without listening/watching you play and having an idea of how much time you have to practice and where you want to go with your playing, but I'm happy to chat some more on it if you want. Hope it helps.
Ok let's see how I should respond to this.
For the most part there are a few songs that I might feel a little apprehension about when getting ready to play them when they come so those I kind of know that I need work but it's not usualy that for the most part it's for lack of a better descrption it's just sloppy play or boredom.
Sure there are a few faster solo licks or whatever that I know I need to work on and scales and such are what i should be doing more of and I have tried to work them into my practice most days. Most of the songs I feel pretty comfortable with so the nervousness isn't a big issue.
Personally I do think I need more technical exercises to work on in addition to the songs I learn. I know if I went all technical I'd get bored quickly and want to quit so I need some fun in there to. Long solo's still give me problems I can't seem to ever work through them to get them down completely and play them long enough for them to stick. When I first started playing remembering a whole song, verses, chorus, bridge, ending etc seemed like an impossible task but that's no problem now it's the solo's that through me off and I'm not at the point where I can insert my own version of a solo that will fit nicely with whatever I'm playing and I don't mean being able to find the appropriate scale it's finding the right melodic or rhythmic qualities to make it sound right if you undersatnd what I'm saying.
"It's all about stickin it to the man!"
It's a long way to the top if you want to rock n roll!
