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Last, but not least... It did take like 8 days in the end, not 6, but anyway. What did I learn from this challenge? I would say, putting artificial restricitions like that made me appreciate more what luxury we have, being able to play multiple strings, haha. One thing that I will keep in mind: Improvise more often to just drum tracks, both rhythm and lead, without any guitar or bass already on the track. Having a strong rhythm as a foundation is actually more liberating than being stuck with a given chord progression. That being said, here is my last contribution to this challenge, gg. Might do this again some time.

Already failed the 6 days part, but oh well. Here is riff 5 on the B string, enjoy!

Day 4, the naughty G string. I have nothing particularly special for today, just a short idea. My tremolo picking definitely needs quite some work. :) Enjoy!

Had zero time for guitar this weekend, so no video yesterday. So here is my third riff. I think it's noticable that I had trouble keeping the 6/8 rhythm at some points, but whatever. I thought the idea itself had some potential. :D Enjoy.

Day 2, String 2, Riff 2: I had no time at all today, and could not even get my looper pedal to work. So here is a simple 12 bar blues, 2 repetitions. First is more like a bass line, the second run through is more a melody. Enjoy.

Day 1, low E string... well, actually D string. I didn't plan much, I just improvised a bunch to a drum track and recorded some of it. A couple of times, the changes in the drums caught me off guard and threw out of rhythm a bit. Anyway, enjoy.

Sorry that it literally starts in the middle, I wanted to keep the video somewhat short but could not find a good starting point in my recording. It's been a while since I uploaded a part of my improv sessions. I've been working on my phrasing, and lately I feel that it is going in the right direction, but there is still a long way to go until I'm satisfied. This backing track inspired me to be a little bit more experimental and playful with non-scale notes, although I actually cut the part of my video out where I really go for chromaticism. Uups. Oh well, as always I appreciate any feedback.

Happy Synner Sunday everyone! I think this is the first time that I'm uploading a literal day 1 riff :D. The first two Skid Row records are very high among my favorite albums of all time, and this song is definitely one of my favorite songs of all time. So I felt it is time that I gave it a shot and start learning it. And I thought, I would couple it with my second run of the #onemonthchallenge. So here is the raw day 1 footage, I haven't learned anything more than the main riff so far (track is on 75 % speed btw). My set goals for the next month are much simpler than last time: Just see how far I'll get with it, and try to upload a progress video for every synner sunday. So yeah, we will see how it goes.

Okay, pants down, here is another playthrough one month later xD. As you can see, I didn't quite get as far as I planned originally. After seeing the footage, my "guitar faces" while strumming simple open chords are hillarious. Otherwise, please excuse how my B strings sounds out of tune, I have no clue why. The tuner says it is perfectly in tune, and also well intonated at the 12th fret, so I have no idea, why (especially fretting the D on the B string) sounds so out of tune. I don't think it is an accidental microbend. Anyway, I think my focus for the next 2 or 3 month (and it was already for the last 2 or 3 weeks) will be way more on rhythm and practicing song playthroughs and way less on super lengthy guitar solos, because I realized that I was neglecting rhythm and full songs too much.

So, this is my starting point for the one month challenge. This song (the iconic intro riff in particular) has been a picking exercise for me in my early days of guitar playing (last year xD), NOW it is time to get more serious. My goals for the one month challenge are: 1) Tighten everything up, add details. Slash doesn't actually just strum the rhythm in the verses, he is playing a couple of interesting picking patterns, that I need to learn and implement... and of course make everything clean and tidy. :) 2) You will notice that the highlight of the song is still missing... the two main solos. Just learning the notes will be doable in way less than a month, but getting the fast parts up to speed and NAILING the phrasing in the melodic parts... That will keep me busy for more than 1 month, but I will try my best to get as far as possible. :)

It's time I put a little update on my work in progress with this song... The second solo is brutal, will take a lot more time until I can play it with the backing track. Also, I learned 90% of it by ear, so there are some parts where it is not completely exact yet, haha. Turns out, my auditorial memory is worse than my visual memory, so memorizing the tabs in combination with the sound is much easier than just memorizing the sound. The high bends are still a little... yucki overall, and I feel my sustain dies in that area of the neck pretty quickly, so my pretty gainy and noisy amp channel counteracts a bit against that (but honestly, I should just try to improve the guitar setup). Alright, enough excuses, here is the brutal and honest state of progress.^^

I haven't uploaded something for a couple of weeks. I have been feeling a bit more creative with my improvisation lately, but it's still lacking smoothness and fluidity and confidence. But it is somewhat progressing in the right direction. Anyway, this is a nice backing track from one of my favorite channels (track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNpX3Fv4edI) in G minor. I started with mostly the G minor pentatonic, and then tried to expand into G Dorian, but I struggled a bit to make that 6th note of Dorian really work, ie. in this case the E. I probably should have focussed on playing that over the C chords in the progression, I still think too much about just the scales and too little in terms of chord tones. Anyway, enjoy my sloppy improv, haha.

This solo is so cool, and a lot of fun to play, I need to learn the second solo as well :)

Okay, so my talking is super awkward and I'm terrible in getting to the point, haha. So I just watched the lessons 101 and 102 yesterday, about the harmonic minor scale and the phrygian dominant scale (the 5th mode of harmonic minor), and I knew I wanted to make my contest entry about this! The phrygian dominant scale is just the normal phrygian scale BUT with a major 3rd!!! You can actually play it over major chords :o, and it will sound awesome even though it is a super dark and mystical and also somehow exotic sounding scale. No wonder it is used a ton in metal. So PG explains that it plays wonderfully over a chord change of two major chords just seperated a minor 2nd (aka half step) from each other, and thats what the backing track of this lesson provides. So I tried playing around a bit over that track, and while my improv does sound a lot like scale runs... hey I've only known this scale for a day, I'm sure there are a lot more interesting melodies hiding in there. ^^

Soo, I haven't uploaded something in a while, since before the holidays I think. So here is something I learned a couple of weeks ago, the solo to the classic More Than A Feeling by Boston. I feel like my soloing is getting a bit more fluent lately, it is something I'm still working on a lot, getting more fluidity with melodic lines, and get more feel into the bends and long notes. But I think a lot of that just comes with enough time, practice and confidence.

I was to busy for Synners Saturday, sorry. BUT I still want to keep a quota of at least one upload per week, so here is something I've been working on for the past month or so... The lead parts of Whiskey In The Jar, so the intro and main solo. Im orienting myself on the Thin Lizzy version. For the most part, the Metallica version is just the Thin Lizzy version with more gain, but there are some differences, like the missing intro. I really love the solo, it's basically just a more fancy version of the vocal melodies, its really melodic. And from a theoretical point of view, its a nice combination of G major and G mixolydian.

Well... I tried xD. To adress rule #1 directly: A major cornerstone of Blues (sorry for the pun) is the I7 IV7 V7 chord progression. Now, Syn tells us in his tips for lesson 68, that a cool scale to chose over this progression is the mixolydian scale, which is a major scale with a flat 7. He tells us to directly adress each chord with its corresponding scale. So for my backing track, that would be E7 with E mixo, A7 with A mixo, B7 with B mixo. Apart from the whole theory stuff, the biggest areas of work for me are still: a) technical skill and b) creative ideas. I found it pretty challenging adressing each chord with its own scale, while also trying to pay attention to the shared notes to make the transitions smooth... and then still coming up with licks that fit all the constraints and are still melodic. Well, here is the result, I tried, and I will continue to try, haha :D.

Well, I still need a day or two for the Syn Tip challenge, but I do have something for Synner Saturday. Today I came across this awesome backing track on youtube which featured the chord progression of Comfortably Numb, so I had to try to improvise a bit over it, because I can't get better if I dont practice, right? Now, David Gilmore is of course the absolute king of vibrato and bending, and I need a loooot of work in both (some of my bends are out of tune as well), haha. Also, my problem which I described in my thread a couple of days ago still persists, I get to easily stuck in a single rythmic idea. I also really need to work on incorporating some of the quicker licks that I already know and practice in isolation (be it pentatonic or natural minor or whatever), but I never really think about it in the moment. But yeah, I think I should start working on the real Comfortably Numb solo in the near future, that will probably REALLY help with the improv as well :D.

Alright, so I've been learning this for about two weeks or so, and for the first Synner Saturday I thought I should be brave enough to post my progress. :-) It is my first finger style song. Oh, and sorry for the bad light in my room, stupid dark seasons. Watching this, I immediatly notice that I need to work a bit on the fluency of the chord changes, the barrés in particular. Other than that, the next step would be to also practice this a bit to a metronome (for the listener, feel is probably more important than super tight timing for accoustic ballads like this, but it can't hurt to do it anyway). Oh yeah, I'm in D standard tuning, so I'm also playing the song in D minor (the saddest of all keys :D).

So I've finally decided to practice standing up using a strap. :D This is also my first video with my new Solar E1.6FBB, had this guitar for two weeks now and I love it sooo much already. It is quite heavy (like 4.5 kg), so practicing for one hour standing up feels a bit hard on the neck and back, haha. Anyway, Enter Sandman rythm with backing track :D.

Allright, so this was the first riff that I uploaded on this site ~ 4 months ago. By now, I'm using the intro, verse & chorus and the first two mini-soli as a daily warmup. For me, the warmup is there to get relaxed and get in the mood to play, so any serious metronome exercises (riffs, scales, etc...) come AFTER the warmup and are not part of it! So thats why there is no metronome in the video. :P I was inspired to actually film this by @[4668:@Alicia Willis] "First riff" challenge, so here is the link to my first filmed riff in my guitar journey for comparison: https://syngates.com/media/sweet-child-omine-intro-lick-80-bpm.3351/

Just a simple exercise playing Arpeggios over a simple I7 - IV7 - V7 Blues progression.

Hey all. Lesson 50 inspired me to do a 10 day workout program focussing on triads of the major scale (for now: G Major). In the lesson, PG plays the arpeggiated triads of the chords within the key of G major staying in one position of the scale (a CAGED position, not 3NPS). The seven basic triads of the key are: I: G ii: Am iii: Bm IV: C V: D vi: Em vii°: F#dim The workout idea is as follows: Day 1 - All triads within first position, ascending backing track Day 2 - All triads within first position, descending backing track Day 3 - move to next position, repeat The goal is a melodic exploration of the keyboard, not timing or speed... other exercises are for that. At least for now! After the ten days, the workout can continue in various directions: Start mixing between the positions, start including extensions like 7 chords, start exploring different keys... The overall goal lies in gaining a deeper melodic understanding of the keyboard.

Been playing since march, I feel like my alternate picking and palm muting has already cleaned up a lot. Played with 8th notes at 70 bpm, this is currently about my comfort speed (obviously depends on the songs). I also want to incorporate the chorus riffs into this, but there is still a lot of work to do, may upload my progress on that at some point this weekend. :-)