Weekly Tip! :)

[Jak Angelescu]

First I’d like to start off by saying I’m sorry if this post comes through a thousand times. The school said I posted it, but it’s nowhere to be found. And I’ve tried posting it again and it just says “You already said that”. But I don’t see it anywhere on the forum :/ And I bet $1000000000000000 Ed is going to say something about me posting?? Yes, I am taking a break from social stuff for the most part to focus on myself with some things I need to sort out, but at the same time I love you guys so much and when I find a good time or have a eureka moment with guitar, I still like to share it with all of you.
My weekly encouragement advice is to let guitar be a part of your life. Instead of trying to sit down and comprise an actual practice schedule, let it be something that instead of sitting on social media or watching tv for your “coming down from the day” routine, pick up the guitar and just play. Who cares if it’s scales, theory, made up chord changes that may sound terrible, a dopey little melody, it doesn’t matter. One of the BIGGEST things I’ve learned that I personally believe make Papa G, Syn and a myriad of other players so good is that they make guitar a part of their life. Just pick it up, play around and let yourself get creative and ‘discover’ things.
Make sure you spend as much time learning the guitar as you do ‘exploring’ the guitar. I’ve been adhering to that and I’ve really loosened up with my playing and felt a lot more ‘free’ in it. I’ve explored a lot more when I said, “What can this thing really do? I’m gonna find out. I know I can play scales. But how can I make them sound?” Sometimes the best practice is not actually ‘practice’, but application. Just like you can do math problems all day, but the knowledge really gets put to the test when you realize you have to divide a recipe by 1/3s (which totally sucks, by the way).
My tip for the week is practice your improvisations to a slower backing track. I will be uploading in what is in my opinion, my best improvisation yet. The reason why is because I got so frustrated I couldn’t do much. I felt myself repeating the same dumpy things over and over again. Then I realized the backing tracks were too fast for me at the moment. So I slowed down the backing track to lesson 24 and experimented. It made a WORLD of difference. I could actually pace myself and focus on trying colorful new things! I was pretty proud of it
Kickass this week, everyone!

 

[Ed Seith]

Great advice, and you’re otherwise going to lose that bet; I already made my point :-D.

 

[Jak Angelescu]

The best kind of friends are those who know you better than you know yourself ??

 

[Dan Shipway]

I often struggle to make the scales sound different, I can play them, sweep them and various other ways of playing them but it is just ascending and descending and it doesn’t sound melodic to me, I am alright at articulation but picking out notes and putting them with others to make a melody doesn’t happen, Any advice?

 

[Jak Angelescu]

@dan YES! This was actually what I just broke through and the exact purpose of my post! I too struggled with that like you have NO idea! We do naturally what feels comfortable for us. So if we are use to just practicing scales and technique that’s all we’re really going to execute is scale patterns with techniques. My biggest advice is let your backing track slow down because it allows you to experiment. When I watch Papa and Syn play, they will start in the middle of a scale to execute a melody. They dart and dash the notes all over the place. For example, I’m currently working on Rock You Like a Hurricane by the Scorpions. I’m learning it by ear, and a lot of it is based off the E minor pentatonic pattern. BUT… Matthias Jabs has several runs where instead of starting the run on E, he’ll start it on B and will do a sequential pattern. I never thought in a million years to do that. Also, make sure you incorporate bends and learn licks. Bends are a really big thing to help your playing sound like something other than scale patterns. Blues is notorious for breaking people out of the box because the infamous scale for the blues is so simple, but they show a billion ways to make the SAME scale, with the SAME chord progression, the SAME time signature, the SAME key signature, all sound COMPLETELY different.
Hope this helps

 

[Guest]

Some great advice after I posted the help me make a practice schedule thing. I see now what you mean. And did you watch that YouTube video that I linked?

 

[Dan Shipway]

Thank you so much I tend to also use octaves as a way to create runs as it helps me articulate differently and makes my playing more fluent. I will bare everything you said.