practice log: am still practicing, first 2 weeks of Jan was a bit rocky but I’m back doing daily practice
messing about with perfect fourths tuning (p4) (EADGCF), it really gives a clear intervallic understanding of jazz lines since the fretboard becomes symmetrical. that G->B major third in the tuning was impeding my understanding of what I was hearing a lot
I don’t think I’ll stick with this tuning forever but it’s already given me a much greater understanding of jazz lines, drop 2 chords and I’ve only been doing it 4 days. gonna keep doing it until someone wants to hire me to play pop songs and then I’ll go back to standard EADGBE
actually i have a guitar in standard still so I’m kind of practicing everything twice, once in each tuning. everything is 3x as fast to learn in P4 and helps me understand the concept better so it’s not a huge time loss
trying to get the freedom of articulation on guitar that you have on saxophone is so maddening. (the ability to do staccato vs legato vs slurred is so bound to fretboard position) does anyone have a clue on where to start with this
no wonder all the jazz guitarists sound like typewriters they don’t have the patience to learn this shit
this is immensely inspirational, i want to make the guitar sing like these country guys make the guitar sing. i’ve listened to this so many times the past few days and no matter how cold i start out, by the time he comes in with that beautiful high note on the second A section (0:50) i am moved
i was starting to doubt it was even possible to make the guitar sing like this. the hardest part of trying to do something ‘atypical’ on the instrument for your form is just, having the belief that it can be done and the possibility exists. knowing it is possible makes the practice feel so much more worthwhile
once you know it is possible to do it, the second hurdle is, believing it is possible for you to do it. it takes so much ironclad belief to keep persisting when you keep messing it up
sax-like slurs on guitar is truly god level difficulty. trying not to tense my left hand too much but it’s tough when so much of slurs on guitar is about left hand. not all of it though because you can do some things with right hand fingerstyle to ease string switching without making it sound like a harsh pick attack. but still. super difficult
it’s unfortunate cuz i hate hate hate the typewriter sound, but the only way out of that is to go godmode with legato and slurs, like level SSS+
You mentioned the importance of phrasing. That seems to me to be the key to your playing.
Pat’s Answer:
That’s the area where most horn players have a hard time with guitar players. Their phrasing just doesn’t feel that good to them. So many guitar players, if they were trumpet players, they’d be tonguing every note; it would be ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. You can’t sell a line with that kind of phrasing. With somebody like Paul Chambers or Clifford [Brown] or Joe Henderson, there’s so many details in the way that they phrase, and so many guitar players don’t even think about that. They’re just going along, and what happens down here ["holds up left and right hands " ] is like, “Well, that’s just what I gotta do to get it out.”
realizing a lot of my anxieties about music practice and Am I Practicing Enough and Ranking Myself against others etc are just leftover traumas produced by the extremely hierarchical music situations i’ve been in in the past. basically all my bands where you auditioned for seats, a cappella group which was basically a frat with “pledges” and “full members” etc… our poor primate brains are conditioned to see these forms of hierarchy as basically mortal threats, because if we’re a low rung on the hierarchy we are liable to get thrown out of a tree and eaten by a leopard or whatever. so no wonder this stuff causes me to panic!! @digs made this point to me earlier but it didnt really sink in, that these attitudes are directly produced by toxic environments and are not a prerequisite to getting extremely good at an instrument.
i hope that with this moment of clarity i will be able to feel freer about my music practice, and hopefully have less resistance to it. but the other part of me is worried that when freed from this anxiety, i will just give up music altogether. idk, i guess we’ll see what will happen!
Yeah I was thinking about that in relation to this, I read several chapters a few months back but then got distracted, got a lot out of it tho. Kenny Werner has a great writing style
signing up for open studio pro was the best thing i did for my music progress. i’ve learned so much since i decided to do this at the end of march(?), having a community of learners is so so vital for staying accountable and staying MOTIVATED to make good progress. everyone just learning and growing together, it’s so good
this is my teacher now, i try to attend class 3-4x a week depending on work schedule
i guess it counts if i’m breaking out the octatrack again because i’ve moved into more composed music and less improv and i want to see how much improv stuff i can add to arrangements that already exist
not an instrument per se but I’ve been working w a friend on writing some pop music and taking it as an excuse to finally learn how to produce a bit. being able to write & arrange in a daw feels really crazy after like a decade+ of writing songs on a janky acoustic guitar, bringing them to the band to figure out an arrangement, playing them live a million times and then maybe recording them months or years down the line in some $$$ studio.
anyway here’s the first thing we did, friend came up with a bass line and I built up the rest around it. she needs to add some vocals but! I’m v happy with it so far for like baby’s first song.
because i can’t learn things like normal people, i have been self-teaching guitar just to be able to play one song on Alicia’s birthday. This is where I ran into multiple issues with my cheapo guitar, including:
My capo detunes it for some reason
higher notes become more and more out of tune
I can’t seem to stop certain awful twanging noises (probably a skill issue tbh)
Anyway I’m really bad at playing guitar, but now I know how to play one song (Stand By Me) as long as I have a capo. I tuned the guitar after putting on the capo so it sounds okay but not great.
I will likely not be fixing any of these issues, I don’t think the guitar is for me. But I’ll at least be able to say I played one song on the guitar.
Woops I wrote this whole post and saw you aren’t planning on fixing it. it seems like a relatively straightforward fix, I do my best to set up all guitars but yeah. some guitars are too cheap and are always gonna suck. I have a cheapo acoustic that is always going to be unplayable, it happens
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Sounds like your action is too high. High string height = notes are pulled sharp when fretting (or capo which is the same thing basically)
Acoustic guitar generally you can’t adjust saddles/intonation. But if your truss rod is too loose, then the neck will bend away from you which increases string height (more the further you go up the neck)
Do this: On the thickest string, use one hand to fret at the first fret and the other to fret at the twelfth fret. Then look at the gap between the string and the sixth fret. If there is more than a tiny sliver of gap between the string and the fret, your truss rod needs tightening. (you can also use a finger to gently tap the string here. it should make a sound but you shouldn’t need to push it very far)
To tighten the truss rod, either take it to a guitar tech for a “setup” (safe way) or look inside the sound hole, there is a slot for an Allen wrench. use the matching size wrench and turn clockwise 1/8 of a turn and no more. You will need to retune, the neck should have straightened out a bit and string height should have gone down. (You can check the truss rod again using the 1st and 12th fret technique above, it will take a few hours to settle in.)
I have a bunch of accessories coming, most notably a basic beginner Yamaha 5C mouthpiece and Rigotti Gold reeds. it was recently serviced which is awesome, it came with a conn precision mouthpiece and some blue box Vandoren 2’s.
anyways I half expected not to get any sound out of the thing, but was surprised to see that I could play out of the box! full range of the horn High F to low B (more or less, still working on getting it cleanly from a cold start). long tones around 10 seconds or less, my breath support could use work. I could never consistently get lo C or low B as a kid (I think) so already things are looking up.
the other accessories that came with it are pretty junk so def will be buying a new neck strap/swabs. my little music studio is upstairs facing the road, we did some tests and it doesn’t look like the sax can be heard from near the neighbors house, so I’m free to practice anytime my gf is awake. with earplugs though because the thing is pretty loud in the room (90-95db in front of the horn).
guitar is happening still also, putting in the late night hours works.
for a couple months now i’ve been thinking of buying a bass guitar. i’m not super concerned about the instrument itself – there’s no way i could afford the one i want the most* anyway – but if anyone has any tips for things to look for in terms of instrument quality/strings/amps, learning materials and things like that it would be much appreciated!
(shamelessly pinging @eska because i remember reading her talk of playing bass in the past)
*it would be one of those sterling by musicman basses
idk about learning materials but you probably can’t go wrong with a Squier P Bass and D’Addario strings. bass strings are cool because no one can hear bass guitar tone anyway so you never have to change them
anyway, I like dr sunbeams! but they’re not exactly a popular choice. it’s v hard to give a blanket recommendation without knowing what kind of bass you’ll end up w, if you’ll prefer pick or fingerstyle, or what genres you’ll be playing, but imo tone is extremely important for bass in a way it often isn’t for guitar because the front-of-note envelope is pretty constitutive of feel
yeah it was a bad question, sorry ><
i’m not super concerned with the hardware itself since i don’t have much room to choose anyway and overthinking these things as someone who still knows Literally Nothing of the subject can be counter-productive.
i guess i’m more curious to hear how people usually learn these skills, how’s the routine like and so on
