learning an instrument thread

MuseScore is what I use since it’s free. It lets you define tuning and number of frets, as well. It also lets you play back the score via MIDI, though there doesn’t seem to be any option for distortion so everything is played back clean.

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btw it’s perilously easy to segue into cruel angel’s thesis from that solo

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Thanks, my attempts always wound up just sounding like the SH3 intro about a minute in where the guitar does that jaunty climb:

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I read some guitar book in 2004, maybe “for dummies,” and it described pentatonic soloing in a “box” where you’re barring e.g. the tenth fret in this case and walking/hopping around in intervals with your other fingers, occasionally venturing out or moving the box. It helped a lot for playing like 90% of rock solos that follow the minor pentatonic

pentatonic box shape is pretty fine esp if you throw the blue notes and bends in there (see squares)
image

personally i prefer diagonal pentatonic, it’s much more fluid imo and breaks out of the box a little bit while still being easy to apply. 3+2, 3+2

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didn’t get a lot of practice done this past week… turns out u need to sleep enough in order to have the focus to learn new things…

my jam sessioning is sort of on hold until i buy a new amplifier, in the meantime i’m trying to figure out what goal to pursue. a) learn a bunch of tunes b) practice my scales in a bunch of ways c) pour myself into transcribing some new solos d) relentlessly practice soloing over the like two standards i know

I learned to play Still Dre on piano this year!

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learning the classic intro to All The Things You Are on top 4 strings (a three-note descending line followed by C# 7#9, then the same thing a half step down)

this 7#9 voicing (in blue) making me wonder whether i’ll finally ‘get’ why i need to learn drop 2’s on top 4 strings. sounds real nice

still trying to learn my fretboard using this method, it’s boring as hell and im thinking whether there’s a supplemental way.

in general i think most people teaching guitar like to focus a lot on metronome when learning or promoting learning and i feel like that’s not how i internalize sounds well, like i need a lot of no-tempo ‘as slow as you need to’ type practice to really internalize sounds. finger motions tho i think im better off just going full tempo right away and my fingers will figure out the fastest cleanest way over time. but internalizing sounds i think i need to linger on them. Where is the D#, where is the Ab, where is the Dorian major sixth, etc

either way i think the classic “start the metronome slow and increase it 5bpm at a time” is basically bullshit and probably actively detrimental to many ppl

openstudio owns, im glad i finally understand one of these videos

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I’ve been trying to force myself to use my ring and small fingers since I place an over-reliance on my index and middle fingers and if I want to eventually be able to play chords I should probably get used to using the other two fingers. Also trying to only use the tip of my index finger instead of laying my finger down “flat” on it.

I’ve been trying to play the acoustic guitar solo from this but it’s played mostly on the upper strings so it’s harder to reach them. I need to get really small adhesive numbers so I can label the fret #s from the top, though last time I tried finding any on Amazon I couldn’t find the size I wanted (thanks to Amazon’s mediocre, fuzzy search engine that gives priority to sponsored results and ignores any attempt to force it to include specific terms; they can afford to send their CEO to the moon but they can’t spend a few grand to have somebody build a decent search engine for one of the biggest ecommerce websites on the goddamn planet).

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try etsy

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re @cask’s post in the axe about learning guitar… big post incoming i guess

1 - beginner tutorial

this series by justin sandercoe is an extremely good roadmap for getting started with the first several months of learning guitar: https://www.justinguitar.com/

2 - daily exercise that pays off in the long run

@doolittle’s post:

Memorizing the fretboard (which position is which note, then intervals and chords) is probably the best early investment you can make.

this is the best exercise i’ve found for fretboard memorization, just do it for five minutes a day from where you left off and don’t worry about whether you’re ‘getting it’ or not, it will happen automatically over a month or two.

(this is a useful fretboard reference to use with the exercise)

3 - General Tips

  • youtube is a rabbithole in general and i would advise once you know what to do, you have to just log off and do it

  • if you can do even 10 minutes every single day, that’s better than randomly doing a couple hours one day and nothing the next. i keep a post-it note with the days and just cross them off as i go.

  • also, uh relax your fingers… it takes almost no strength to play guitar, flexing super hard won’t do anything except hurt. if you’re struggling with that you may want to get your guitar ‘set up’ by a tech, it’s possible with cheap guitars that the strings are too far away from the fretboard.

  • try to always practice consciously, things that push your boundaries a liiitle bit. (“productive discomfort”) if you ‘practice’ stuff you already know, you’re not growing new grooves in your brain and you can feel stuck.

Learning Solos

for learning a specific solo, my best tip is “learn it off the record” - i.e. by ear.

  1. listen to the solo a bunch (the openstudio jazz folks like to say “listen to it twenty-one times”)
  2. sing it note for note, rhythmically correct, with the accents articulations etc
  3. find the best fingering on the fretboard
  4. practice it along with the record

(the transcribe! software is good for repeated listening… you can use the slow down tools in there if you need to hear the notes specifically, but i try to stick to 100% tempo for actually practicing, otherwise it’s tempting to always stick to slowed down mode. there are some neuroscience techniques to help you learn fast lines that are superior to the typical advice)

4 - finding your niche

this is for after you’ve done the above for several months… finding which songs and artists you want to sound like or emulate, or learn the songs of, etc. For most(?) people this is the easiest part. (For me, this was the hardest part, cuz i don’t love most guitar genres)

Once you know what you want to sound like, you can learn from those folks (Youtube or lessons), or you can branch out and take advice from multiple genres. (e.g. even if you don’t play jazz, jazz saxophonists have a lot of thoughts about what works and doesn’t work in the practice room)

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things i been practicing recently:

  1. going thru these in order - Things I’ve Learned From Barry Harris - YouTube
    → a pretty no-nonsense way to learn bebop idioms and exercises that help you learn the changes of a jazz standard.
    been working on taking the scales through a standard, working on the chromatic/half-step embellishment rules, having faith that this will translate into playing that sounds more like bebop.

  2. continuing to work on fretboard notes - much more solid than i was a few months ago at it. altho haven’t been focusing very hard. should have done this ages ago i guess.

  3. soloing based on key centers - i.e., for soloing over a standard, not trying to do complicated Chord Scale Theory scale running*; not trying to just run the arpeggios constantly; rather, figuring out the key of a cadence, and just playing those notes. i think this is really my foothold into jazz soloing right now.
    you can solo over the entirety of Autumn Leaves with the notes of Bb Major (which is G minor), in just one position on the neck. automatically begin to feel out which notes of the scale are more ‘fitting’ or stable over which chords. (turns out you often want to play the C over a Cm7, rather than a D.)
    okay, then once you’ve done that over the song for several days, start to feel which notes are more ‘spicy’ or evocative over certain parts of the chorus. E.G.!
    → if i play Bb major notes only, that means i’m playing Locrian over the Am7b5 chord. maybe I want to not do that and play some other scale that fits.
    → Maybe I want to play Dorian over the Gm chord instead of Aeolian, to get that stable Gm6 sound.
    so we start to get away from like, a purely diatonic sound, or a purely “Dorian-Mixolydian-Major” over every 2-5-1, into things that are more interesting.

then looking at the slightly more complex example of All The Things You Are:


so the idea is, start with the red scales and then once that’s comfortable, add non-diatonic notes as desired for the underlying chords

*so the alternative of what I describe here is best displayed in this video, which jumps a few steps ahead of where i’m comfortable and is beyond my ability right now.
Scale Running - Guided Practice Session™ with Adam Maness / Why Does This STUPID Exercise Sound SO GOOD?
this is kind of the currently in-vogue improvisation method at Berklee and other music schools rn, but it’s not really how the 30s-50s jazz artists thought about soloing, i think.


i dunno if others find this to be true, but i find that the hardest thing about youtube tutorials for music is that they’re unable to give you the best “next step” that builds off of where you currently are, past the beginner stage. like, i spent several months bouncing off of this OpenStudio scale running exercise, even Step 1, until I built myself a Step 0, or even a Step -1, that allowed me to actually grok how the hell this worked and what needed to happen beforehand. As Adam Maness would say, this is all about “building macros in your brain” and you have to build a lot of them for yourself. It’s like uhhh coding without an asset store, or something like that. Hack it yourself vibes.

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this is the video that kind of gave me the idea that ‘i dont have to learn it the way everyone teaches it’ from that channel

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the most fun way to learn a song is to accidentally play it and go “aw” when you realize you’ve committed plagiarism by the odds of finite geometry and frequencies

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i accidentally played the state farm insurance theme yesterday when practicing scales

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How we doing? folks practicing stuff?

I started working out of The Guitarist’s Introduction to Jazz by Randy Vincent, which got a lot of praise from famous jazz guitarists e.g. Julian Lage. I like it so far, it progresses logically from getting your chords down cold, doing a lot of rhythm guitar stuff, only introduces soloing much later. I’ve been doing a lot of technical practice for single note lines, but this is like the technical practice for chord progressions.
I think books are better for me than video instruction maybe. I get impatient with videos esp the slow paced/less engaging presenters.

I stopped working on the two songs I’ve been doing for like… six months? had no passion for them, bored the piss out of me, can’t learn like that. In retrospect I should have dropped these songs ages ago. Passion is so key!

so I started learning Misty and My One And Only Love. beautiful ballads I love, I’m a big sap.

Also getting back to transcribing, focusing specifically on the tunes I’m working on (the above two and the blues). Focusing on guitarists also, I’m tired of trying to transcribe instruments I don’t play.

Interested in folks’ attitudes towards practice journals. I made mine a little more “bullet journal”- y and I think it’s helping. Setting 5-10yr/ 1yr/ 3mo/ 1mo/ weekly goals; Having a weekly “schedule” to know what I want to accomplish each day; reducing the friction to sit with the instrument.
I mentioned elsewhere, I’m also going fully offline when I practice and it def helps. Airplane Mode >>>

My speed practice is sort of at an inflection point. it’s all well and good to practice the same old major scale patterns at 160bpm 16th notes but I need to attach it to a purpose. I think I will try to attach it to the scales I can play over my tunes.

I should add a non-ballad to work on but got plenty on my plate for now.

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drilling the key of C# on piano makes just want to shift the MIDI map up a half step but I’m committed to trying

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yeah big advantage of guitar is easy transposing… but we’ve just hooked up the digital piano here so i guess i’ll get to feel that pain eventually

update on last post: have done a good job learning Misty and a ‘decent’ job learning My One and Only Love… i think i just havent had as much interest in the latter so im not forcing myself on it. i will come back around to it soon

made 14 pages worth of progress in the Vincent book, it’s good stuff, feeling pretty good about my progress on that this past week. met my weekly target

i didnt meet my transcribing goals last week (was trying to do some Pat Martino solos) which tells me i didnt really have a clear focus and desire to do it, so this coming week i want to transcribe some Chet Baker Sings stuff. i love love love that album and find it really (comparatively) easy to improvise on, melodies come to mind much more readily. i think that’s a function of how well i know the melodies and how deeply i’ve listened to it. so hopefully i can learn some of the songs straight off the record.

also i hooked up my jimi hendrix pedals for some reason (fuzzface and wah) and trying to find some joy in that. thinking of this video

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practice log: am incredibly bad at keeping focus on one thing for multiple weeks in a row. for the past 3 weeks been working on really understanding Blue Train, and by extension blues.

transcribed multiple choruses of the Curtis Fuller trombone solo, learned the head, learned some chord voicings for it, learning some language from the Coltrane solo, trying to solo over it daily. it feels like the progress is slower than drip coffee but it’s actually real. everything i’ve ‘learned’ up until this point by jumping round feels like it’s just drifted off into the wind somewhere. maybe i’m making more progress than i think, or maybe my brain just isn’t as plastic as it should be. idk.

easy to swing wildly from motivated by progress to demotivated by plateau/backsliding. trying to eat right and get enough sleep

i was definitely taking on way too much stuff at once before, I should have known better. but I guess you live and learn. I’m going to continue with this one track for maybe a couple weeks into January and then switch to something new - probably a rhythm changes or one of the songs I ‘sort of learned’ previously.

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