Day 7 | First steps
I’ve been fooling around with the song for a week. Time to report on my progress!
What I achieved this week
- Worked the first 7 bars of the intro to 35% of the original tempo
- Explored the next 8 bars to familiarise myself with the rhythm and finger placement
Audio proof of my progress:
I’m a lot happier with my progress than that track shows. Recording makes me nervous…
My process
As explained in my plan of action, I broke down the song into sections and decided to start by learning the intro and get it to 30% speed before moving on to the next section.
When I learn to play a new piece I like to write down the tabs, chords, lyrics, etc… in a notebook. I don’t like following a music sheet on a screen nor printed material. I prefer my own writing. And it helps me memorise the piece.
For this one though, because I expect it’s going to be a large piece to write down, I might want to correct stuff in the tab as I progress, and I’d like to include tabs in my blog posts, I tried an online tool: flat.io . It’s not the worst out there, it’s free, but it’s not an amazing experience…
I used a couple of Youtube videos to get the tab for the intro down: this one from GuitarLessons365Song and that other one by Nikola Gugoski which is less of a lesson than slow play along tabs. I cross referenced what I took from these videos with the Ultimate Guitar “official” tab. For now I’m going to stick with this hybrid version I put together, and I’ll refine it later:
(I still have 8 bars to explore and write down in the intro)
After exploring them, I practiced the first 7 bars with a metronome. Starting at 25bpm while looking at the tabs at first. Then I forced myself to memorise them, and got off script quite quickly. I only allowed myself to increase the tempo after playing the section 4 times in a row without a mistake at the current speed. I progressed to 50–55bpm (35–40% of the original tempo) and refrained from going further at this point. I was so in the zone I could have kept repeating these 7 bars for hours to get faster… but it was time to move forward!
While I kept practising the first 7 bars at 50bpm (it’s a great warm up), I moved my focus to discovering the next 8 bars. There’s a lot of string skipping and challenging intervals, so it took me some time to figure out the finger placement. I think I have one down now that feels “comfortable” so in Week 2 I’ll start practising this section with a metronome.
First Impressions
- That intro is a good finger workout!
- Working with a metronome is a game changer
- My memory works better than I thought it would
- I might have simplified the first 7 bars a bit and left out legato here and there. Something I could work on in Week 2?
- It feels good to have a goal and a plan to achieve it!
Thank you for reading my progress update this week! If you have a question, please leave a comment below :)
See you next week!
