I’ve been failing at this one for a while now. Ultimately my brain is just too slow when it comes to changing from picking notes to strumming chords and back again.
I love this song, in part because it introduced me to 7-type chords. Probably should have used the acoustic for this.
I’m still trying to get these shapes into my muscle memory, but I thought it might work better if I dressed up to play jazz…
Lots of footage of me being sloppy today that I’m too ashamed to share. This is me being slow and trying to work out a bit of a song. This is closer to the truth of my practice sessions than when I post the more polished bits.
I’ve been struggling with motivation recently - when I don’t post here it means I’ve not been practicing. So today I just tried to make some noise to cheer me up. I love how Graham Coxon’s cacophony works in the context of Blur, particularly live - lots of energy and emotion in what should be chaos but manages to have structure thanks to the rest of the band. I’m shit at it, but playing this reminds me a bit of why I wanted to play guitar in the first place, to have that release.
Another early rock and roll riff to show how bad I am at the simple stuff.
Lovely little rhythm riff that’s fun to adlib over, particularly if you throw in the wah too. Because the backing is interesting on its own it’s a good one to leave negative space in the lead side, rather than being tempted to fill everything with notes.
Only managed 15 mins today - didn’t feel very with it, and my hands are cold. Excuses, excuses.
This week R.E.M. released a remix of WTFK? reminding me of what a great song the original is, and something I used to play when I first learned guitar. This really isn’t practice, but it’s occasionally nice to just rock out :) (though the neighbours may not agree)
Dedicated to Laura 😘 Classic early rock and roll licks are proving to be a good source of simple things to try make me play more precisely.
Yet more things to highlight my sloppy playing :) This is also not in a familiar scale shape, so it currently feels arbitrary to play, lacking the familiar physical structures I like things to fit in.
Also, jazz chords tacked on at the end also are not all in my muscle memory yet, so it’s like learning guitar for the first time on some of those :)
Playing mostly blues covers up quite a lot of my sloppy playing. Getting this tune to even this level took embarrassingly long. (Aside: I’ve been fortunate enough to see hank marvin play this live)