Running Blues

Guitar Lessons (Part 2):

In the last post, I talked about how the fundamentals of my playing was changed after attending lessons so let’s talk about the new things I learnt from my lessons.

Before I started taking lessons, I did not have a good grasp of the basics of “touch” and “feeling” in a guitar playing context. Often, I mistook the two for just “playing slow”. Izzat introduced the idea of letting the notes “sing” in a solo, which is to say, apart from just playing the note as it is, let the note be expressed further with bends, slides, hammer-ons, pull-offs and vibrato. A note played as it is relative to all the other notes played before and after it can eventually become boring or expressionless. The dynamics of the note that is played became the focus of the lesson. Simple four note solos were played with varying degrees of volume and expression and we later moved on to five, six note solos which really challenged me to tell as much of a “story” as I can with these few notes.

“Touch”, from what I gathered, had to do with dynamics of play.

“Feeling” had to do with the expressions (bends, slides etc) used to play the note(s).

Another idea I gathered from that lesson was to be able to “sing” what I wanted to play in my head before I actually played it. Often, I would find myself sounding similar from solo-to-solo in terms of what licks I was playing. The reason for that was because I was not coming up with anything new during the solos, but was just playing something that I have practised before. This made my playing very similar to other guitarists out there and my solos similar to each other. Singing the notes in my head, or at least remember what the notes sound like in a particular scale, helped make soloing easier (though I still need more work on that).

The last thing I want to talk about my guitar lessons is learning how to shred.

First off, playing fast has never been my forte, but the speed lick exercises I have learnt thus far have really improved my picking and fretting speed (nowhere near Paul Gilbert’s standard though). I have also learnt the terrifying art of sweep picking (dun! dun! dun! dunnnn!!! only one minor triad though, still working on the other two as well as major triads).

I find sweep picking to be really fun and interesting to incorporate into some ideas which I have already. Like instead of sliding to a note, why not do a minor triad sweep up to the note? It makes for a more interesting way to introduce the note! However, although sweep picking is fun, it IS really hard to get the notes out clean and disjointed from the rest, as well as to stay in tempo. It’s quite a challenge to do it correct because of the sheer speed that my fingers are supposed to move at. Ahh… I need to practise more and smarter!