First, a little about me for context: I'm a 21 y.o. electric guitarist, been playing for 11 years. I have:
- Written instrumental funk for 4 years (guitar pro warrior)
- Played prog rock/metal (mainly Polyphia) for 3 years
- Played contemporary Christian rock in church for 7 years
- Recently began playing and singing at the same time, and vocal songwriting
- Currently in an emo/ pop-punk band
- Currently in an instrumental funk band
- Currently in my university jazz band (small jazz bar jazz band and traditional big band)
My aims with guitar right now are:
- Become more consistent at improvising (sometimes it feels great, like I'm perfectly in tune with the instrument, other times it feels clunky or as if I'm grasping at ideas I can't play)
- Cement some techniques and stylistic ideas that help me stand out and sound unique as a player
- Create a more organised practice schedule so I can see measurable progress
- Break some speed limits, especially with alternate picking (because why not)
- Make my timing more consistent, especially as I fatigue
- Wake up to some bad habits that I almost certainly have
What I'm working on right now (and for the last 3 weeks) is practicing a solo for my emo band:
I need to work on consistently differentiating the quintuplets from the triplets and 32nd notes in bar 5 as well as cleaning up the final run in bar 7. A problem I've run into is that I get tired very quickly after practicing this solo, so I have to keep taking breaks or my performance drops massively.
I'll try and upload a clip of me improvising so I can get advice on that soon.
- Peter
A bit of time to kill before my teaching schedule resumes properly after the Christmas period and I've been looking into this a bit. As ever when teaching stuff I don't know I approach it with the view of "How would I learn to play this?". First up of course I translate it into Taplature format. Here's the 2 bar problem section zoomed in on for detailed examination (which hopefully matches up with what you've written above 😉):
I've added a full count underneath and for the 32nd notes used my favourite way to count them as "Jabberwockies" (though replacing the "Jabs and "wocks" with the count itself). I've omitted the standard notation rhythm markers so as not to overload the space with too much ink. For ease of looping I've inserted a "woodpecker" (pick mute) on the first beat. Here's a slowed mp3 taken from your video which lets you hear how your current timing fits against the beat:
Full solo slowed 50% (35bpm)
and a zoom-in on the 2 bar sequence under focus: 2 bars set up to loop I'll have a go at learning these couple of bars (which should be fun on a high-action guitar set up for blues 😋) and will report in. From your point of view, once you get the foot tap working correctly in this section the rest should be a breeze! What do you make of this approach so far?