Over the summer, I started my fourth attempt to play guitar. I actually had the time to practice a bit daily, and the lack of physical requirement to play made for good stress relief after practice when marching band started up. Unfortunately, as school approached exam season, and marching band closed in on the final performances, I didn’t have as much practice time as I would’ve liked.
This week, I started my daily practice regime on guitar once again. Now that I have some amount of free time, I wanted to see how far I’d come. I started seeking out more difficult songs, more solo-style tablature, etc. I found that, although I most certainly wasn’t able to play everything I tried on the first day, and some songs I had to put down entirely, I had a better understanding of the instrument since the last time I went looking for songs. I better understood certain faster strumming techniques, and I knew which notes and chords went together. I was actually able to come up with some simple chord progressions, and I started wondering how really skilled guitarists understood the instrument. I started with the obvious choice for a talented guitarist, Jimi Hendrix. I watched his performance of the star spangled banner, and a number of analyses of the pedals, bending, and strumming effects he used. When I went back to watch the performance again, it was really interesting to see how easily he played, and how comfortable he was with the guitar. I moved on to Brain May, the guitarist of Queen, then several other classic rock guitarists. Although not to the same degree as Hendrix, they all had similar “comfort” with the instrument. This was really interesting to see, and led me to work on playing without focusing as much on the frets and strings, to develop more comfort with where my fingers should be, and how notes should sound. I’d been putting together a solo piece based on Gerudo Valley, from The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, and used the knowledge I’d gained to add a few sections. The song used to sound dull after the first few sections, since the whole point of it was to only use a few notes and a few basic structures to make a longer song with lots of variations on them. Now that I used bend on some of the notes that were held out, it added a level of style and improvisation to each section, so the song stayed fairly fresh throughout the duration. After this, I worked on Thunderstruck by ACDC, a fairly simple song. The difficulty lied in the pattern it used on the walk-down portion that plays through most of the song. It first walks down two notes, then repeats two of those notes, then continues the walkdown, repeating the previous note after every new one, then cycles between the final two notes. Also, you strum the open string after every note you play. (This sounds kinda complicated when I write it down, it’s fairly simple when you play it.) It’s the same pattern through most of the song, but due to how easy it is to be a little bit off on any note, and how recognizable this riff is, it took a lot of refining make it sound right. It had given me a lot of trouble a few weeks ago, but after getting more comfortable with the frets and faster strumming, I was able to play it a lot quicker.
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