Share Your Breakthroughs and Achievements!

[Jak Angelescu]

At first, it was like every few years I’d have a ‘eureka’ moment with guitar where things just ‘clicked’. Now, I’m having them almost biweekly. At first, it was my picking technique and getting it better with the proper positioning and gripping. Then I started to notice the CAGED system really has been helping me with my improv because I have a general idea of where to at least ATTEMPT to start. It also helped me play some of the leads in A7X’s “Planets” without needing the tab book *cough (the book was really REALLY wrong) cough* almost just by ear and going right into it. But tonight was HANDS DOWN my biggest accomplishment! I have a solo (which I play on here) for an original song that I struggled with at 120bpms with a part was a series of sixteenth notes at a sequence kind of like Syn’s final Etude for alternate picking. At band rehearsal tonight, I took a chance and played the solo up to speed (126bpms) and did it! When I was practicing earlier today, I seriously watched about ten live solos of Syn and just glued my eyes to his fingers the whole time and suddenly it clicked and I thought, “You KNOW what you’re doing. Get in there and MAKE that shit happen!” When he does challenging licks, ostinatos and runs, you can tell he has complete control over his hands. I found myself slacking off and being “worried” and tensing up when those kinds of tricky things came around. It was like a muscular and neurological light went off and said, “Make it happen, because you ARE capable of doing it.” I swear if it wasn’t for me learning proper picking technique and other things on here I wouldn’t EVER been able to pull that off.
So share some of your breakthrough moments from this school! I’d REALLY love to hear them!!

 

[Richard O'connor]

Awesome, great to hear everything’s clicking in to place. I’ve also found that learning the proper picking technique has helped me, especially with sweeping.
I’ve always wanted to be able to play the afterlife solo, not necessarily because it’s a7x, but just because it’s just such a challenging solo. So the other night I recorded myself playing it, good or bad I just recorded. So I’m going to give it a month of solid practise and record it again. I’ll put it up, whether it’s good or bad.

 

[Daniel Sobota]

I’m still only a beginner, and have been playing guitar on and off for less than a year, so I don’t have any big breakthrough moments yet, at least not when it comes to applying things from this school.
But I guess this somewhat counts as a breakthrough: the time I learned how to play Enter Sandman riff few months ago. It made me realize it isn’t that hard, I just need to fucking practice lol. But yeah, now I’ve learned the intro and the riff to Freezing Moon by Mayhem, just few days ago. It’s hard for me to find time to practice because of school, but I’m going step by step.
Hopefully in a year or so, I can share some bigger breakthrough achievements haha.

 

[Jen Hapke]

I’m forcing myself to learn alternate picking at the moment. And I know I will get much faster and finally stop playing melodies like it just comes up and then end up in mistakes.
The CAGED system helped me a lot, too. It helps to understand what you are actually doing. I knew the pentatonic shapes before but the lessons here brought them in a order. Now it becomes a whole thing.

 

[Noah Berends]

I’ve definitely noticed an increase in my picking and theory knowledge from this site, which are the two things I lacked in most. My pick synchro sucked prior to this site and after going through a few of the picking lessons I’m definitely seeing an improvement. I also am very excited about the theory-related content I’m learning, because for the past two or three years I’ve been putting much more emphasis on improv rather than learning songs, so now that I’m getting somewhere with technique, I need a little theory to top it off!

 

[idssdi]

I haven’t really done a lot of the lessons here. I just did 3-1-3 pattern, inside outside picking and syns alternate picking etude VII. Syn also helped with some gypsy jazz stuff(it turns out to be a lot more complicated than I thought). I do seem to be a bit more precise with my picking(especially from learnig syns etude and inside outside picking) I haven’t really beem ae to use the 3-1-3 pentatonic stuff in my improvisation yet and I kinda want ro be able to throw in the diminished scale, double harmonic scale and super locrian mode in my improvisation(I tried but I had to think to much so it sounded like shit)