April 1st, 2023
How it’s been going:
It’s been a little bit since I last updated this. I’ve been pretty busy going through Justin’s rock song book and Troy Stetina’s Total Rock Guitar book. Both have kept me busy enough that I haven’t touched much of the grade 4 course since going through the videos. At first I used my improv time to practice the major scale but ended up using that time to practice the solo for Smells Like Teen Spirit. Now, I’m using it to practice the lead part in the next song for Troy’s book. It’s too bad I usually only have an hour to practice cause now I have to really pick and choose from multiple things that I want to work on.
What I’ve been Playing:
- Should I stay or Should I go by the clash- Part of my rock songbook study. I finished this song almost a month ago but I still play it from time to time because it’s so fun. AVOYP Here.
- Smells Like Teen Spirit - 11th song in my rock songbook study. One of my favorite bands playing one of my favorite songs! This also will now forever be the first song I played the lead/solo for. AVOYP Here.
- Liquified- Song 2 of Troy’s total rock guitar book. First of this book that I posted in the AVOYP section. It was a really simple lead-ish riff. I liked the sound of it, and it’s also harder to play that it seems. Was fun. AVOYP Here.
- Alt/Grrl/Power pop- Song 3 from Troy’s book. Silly name, but it’s actually a pretty awesome song. There’s a rhythm and a lead-ish part with some minor pentatonic riffs and even a couple of bends. I’ve been playing this for a couple of weeks now so I should be able to record and post this one soon. Maybe in a week or two.
- Song 2 by Blur- I only just started this song a day or two ago. It’s pretty simple though, it seems the toughest part for me so far is finding a way to get my amp to sound so fuzzy. The distortion on this one is something. I’ll probably record this closer to the end of the month. Mayybe early May.
The Plan:
Since the next song in Justin’s book is fairly simple, I think I’m going to spend some time alternating between working on that and grade 4 stuff. I want to get to a shaped barre chords at some point but also want to spend some more time on the major scale stuff before moving on. I think I have the rhythm stuff for this grade down though.
As far as Troy’s stuff goes, I originally was going to alternate between songs from Total Rock Guitar and Metal Rhythm guitar Volume 2, but I feel like the total rock guitar ones have been so easy that I want to spend more time getting through them to catch the difficulty up to MRGV2s songs. There are 23 total in the book and I think I’ll catch up to the difficulty at around song 10.
New Gear/Purchases:
I bought Justin’s Blues Lead guitar solo book. I’m no where near good enough to start it but I like to buy things that inspire me to get better. I don’t have time to start going through it anyway, lol. At the very least it’s another way to support Justin. My “One day I’ll get to this” pile is starting to get pretty large though…
