Weekly Update 14-11-09

Phil, for that tremolo strumming, I found 3 things that really helped: 1) use a thinner pick. I ended up using a Fender medium. With a Jazz III I broke the G, B and E strings lol. I found a more flexible pick helped out a lot. 2) If you look at my video, I'm doing the strumming way up on the neck; that helps in two ways: first it takes the whole "getting the pick too far into the strings" out of the equation as you can just rub the pick back and forth across the fretboard and second, in my recordings I noticed I was getting a ton of pick noise while strumming in the normal place over the pickups, and by moving up to the neck that went away. 3) if you look at my video, my left hand thumb is pointed up towards the ceiling, but as I'm tremolo strumming one chord, I simultaneously rotate my thumb so that it's pointing towards the headstock and therefore in position to play the next chord immediately.  That got rid of the gap between two of the chords near the end that was always plaguing me.

I don't know if you want to do it that way or if those tips only worked for me, but I just thought I'd put it out there in case you might find it helpful, I know it took me a lot of time to get that part going 

I had a pretty good week of practice; I kept a practice log that WPB made up (thanks man!) and according to that I practiced guitar for 11 hours and bass for 7.5 hours.  Worked a lot on the lead for True Trem Blues in More BYCU.  I can play it moderately well at 90% full tempo;  at 95%...not so much.  Need to practice that pedal tone lick in isolation, mostly going form the D to the E string.  The tremolo picking is at the same tempo throughout the song, and at some points I notice my picking hand is extremely relaxed - I need to duplicate that feeling during the pedal tone part.  And those darned double bends at the end are always causing me problems lol.  You bend up the E, then release that and bend up the E and B together;  I try to get the B jammed under my finger when I'm doing the first bend with the E, but then of course you need to end that note and un-bend, which is a tad hard while simultaneously trying to keep two strings under your finger.  Sigh...I'll figure it out eventually I suppose

Just barely got started on Funky Soul in the R&B book.  That's a very cool song with lots of short, rhythmic phrases.  Very funky.  And then there's one super fast lick in there too.  Right now I'm at about two-thirds of the slow tempo version.

Worked a little on my chord progression book, a bit on my Fingerstyle book, also worked on a fingerpicked version of Silent Night, and got started on Hide Away by Freddy King.  I found the guitar tab online and I've got the bass tab in one of my books.  And I improvised along with backing tracks as usual.

On bass I spent a lot of time with my Guitar Aerobics book, here's the week 1 lesson if you want to hear it:





That big descending lick towards the end ain't so great, but hey it's week #1 of a 52 week course  Today I'll start the week 3 lesson, but week #2 still needs some work.  I also worked on the bass line for True Trem Blues quite a bit.

And I see I've typed a small novel again lol.

Jack,

Sounds like you had a good week - 18.5 hrs of practice!

If you put together a backing track (drums and bass) for Hideaway and you want to share it, I'll be 1st in line. That's a song I'd really like to learn, especially after seeing Freddie King's Live version.

Thanks, Jack. Are you going to do Freddie King's studio version or another version?