Beatup6string's (formerly called Giskard) learning log

Community Hub Learning Logs
21

A look back at 2025.

I feel like this year has pushed me past one plateau and onto another climb.

It all started last year though - with BLIM. The course opened my eyes to the progress I could make if I set myself specific goals, followed a plan, and put more hours into the guitar. When the course ended, I had enough momentum and motivation to set myself twin goals for the year - repeat BLIM so I consolidated what I had learnt, and start and finish Grade 4. Thats what I focused on for the first few months.

Near the end of BLIM, I was fortunate enough to win a 1:1 lesson with Justin. That took place in April, and no surprise, I got great advice on structuring my practice routine towards these goals, and several tips on technique, theory and learning to improvise solos.

In August, I attended my first Justin Guitar Workshop! Each morning featured lessons in theory, musicality, singing, playing in a band and guitar techniques and concepts (alt tunings, thirds…). In the afternoons we were randomly assigned to a band, and tasked with agreeing a song we all wanted to play, figuring out complimentary parts, rehearsing them and then performing in front of the class at the end of the day. What started off as “utterly nerve wracking”, especially when I signed up to sign and play a song solo, somehow ended with “wow we just played two songs at the restaurant”, and more recently, Community Open Mic’s in August and November!

BLIM and the workshop led to closer connections with several people in the community, and some of us meet over Zoom calls to compare notes, talk guitar, ask questions etc. Two of my new friends live close enough to meet up in person and jam, and we are working on four songs for a January meetup! Videos may be shared if things go reasonably well and everyone’s comfortable doing so…

A few thoughts and self-reflections:

  • I wish I had overcome my fear of singing earlier. Learning to play and sing a song has led to a deeper understanding of the song, as well as ideas for adapting songs for a solo performer situation.
  • Strumming along to songs with the app was a lot of fun the last few years, but learning to play them on my own or with other humans has made me pay much closer attention to what makes each song different, and the specific techniques needed to play them. For example, the rhythm of the Day Tripper riff, the use of bass runs to link chords in Sweet Virginia, the triad riff in End of the Line, and how the interplay between palm muted hits on the bass note and strums on the thin strings makes While My Guitar Gently Weeps sound a lot more like the original!
  • Even after several months of barre chord practice, I still accumulate tension in my fretting hand, which makes changes harder and tires me out. I’ve started five minutes of “as relaxed as I can be, release pressure, release tension, then move to the next chord” practice. Hope that helps.
  • Forearm angle wrist angle, finger position, where exactly I make contact with the fretboard really matters for barre chords and melodic lines and legato picking and vibrato.
  • And I need to make sure I reach the right finger angle and position each time I move my hand/fingers, else rolls and slides are harder, and vibrato quality suffers.
  • Bending is a lot better than a year ago. Bend vibrato and quick bends and bends as part of triplets will stay on the todo list.
  • My sense of time has improved, eg I can mix chords and licks or shuffle and licks in a E major blues and stay on time more often than not.
  • Fartlek Subdivisions helped with fretting/picking hand coordination and general rhythm awareness. I need to make time for Strumming SoS in '26.
  • But I don’t always remember where I’m in the changes. Which makes it hard to play a two measure turnaround and I resort to the old 1-7-5-5 more often than I want to.
  • Blues licks/ vocabulary gave me a lot of phrases to fall back on… Major scale improvs are noticeably harder without these building blocks. I tend to pick a melody line and play around with it, not sure how long that will last!

Gear acquired this year:

  • My first tube amp (Blues Junior)
  • Boss RC-5 Looper (drum tracks are a nice change to playing over a metronome)
  • Cordoba Mini-Bass
  • Les Paul Standard

Plans for 2026:

  • Solo Acoustic Blues
  • Grade 5 (and maybe a folk song or two)
  • Strumming SoS and Justin’s Rhythm Workbook
  • 4 Open Mics (or more if I can swing it)
  • Learn some Rock songs ahead of Rock Immersion
  • Just Keep BLIM’ing :slight_smile: keep jamming over songs in different keys, gospel slides, 9th chords, so much more to get under my fingers!
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22

A ‘first quarter’ check-in to keep myself honest and (perhaps) help anyone following similar trails through the guitar world.

  • Solo Acoustic Blues: I started the course, and have learnt the first piece, started the second, but I am going to go slow on this, and might park this for a few months until I complete Strumming SOS.

  • Grade 5: Worked through the first two modules! Decided to consolidate my E and A shaped barre chords and work on making them feel comfortable, sound comfortable, and connected smoothly before moving on.

  • Fingerstyle folk song - does Girl from the North Country count? That’s what @Richard_close2u taught me recently - I was lucky enough to win a 1:1 lesson with Richard, and a most enjoyable lesson it was! I intend to get it ready for a future OpenMic.

  • 1 OpenMic done so far, 3 to go. I wound up hosting that OM, which was a new scary-but-fun experience for me!

  • Strumming SOS: Why didn’t I do this years ago! I am only halfway through ‘Foundations’ and can already hear the difference in my strumming.

  • Rock songs - it’s a broad term, so hopefully these all count.

  • Day Tripper was the hardest to get under my fingers - that riff-in-B still trips me up, and I can’t play and sing at the same time (yet). It’s also a good Dom-7 barre chord workout.

  • While My Guitar Gently Weeps told me that I needed to work on barre chords (per above). I learnt a simple bass accompaniment when I played this with two JG Community friends.

  • Sweet Virginia helped me work on linking chords and ‘new twiddles’. I have learnt the vocals and now need to connect vocals and guitar parts together in time for an OM.

  • End of The Line was a great workout in triad riffs, and memorizing lots of lyrics! I played this at the Jan 31st OM.

  • Born Under a Bad Sign is work-in-progress. I’ve got the riffs under my fingers, now I need to memorize each section and play along with the song.

  • Just Keep BLIM’ing: I started taking lessons with Dave Birnie, and am drinking from the firehose. We are working on improving my technique (bends, vibrato, legato), fretboard knowledge (minor and major pentatonic scales and the chord-shapes that go with each pattern), a Peter Green song (Stop Messin’ Round), solo analysis, etc. It’s a lot of fun, and I am playing more difficult stuff than I’ve ever played before. The song has 3 solos, and the first one took me a long time to get under my fingers. The second is going a bit faster and I started the third one this week. I am going to keep at it until I can play the whole song.

  • Singing Lessons: I took my first ‘proper’ vocal lessons this week! The tutor thinks “we have something we can work with” - phew!

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23

Eventful couple of weeks:

  1. Fun jam night last week with two of my community friends - Day Tripper, Born Under a Bad Sign, End of the line and We are gonna be friends.

  2. My son dropped in this weekend, a last minute trip. He plays guitar too, and I had fun trying to improvise over one of his made up chord progressions, and trying to work out and improvise with melodic fragments from While My Guitar and House of the rising sun. I need to do more of this kind of practice, with my RC5.

  3. Performed Sweet Virginia at OM 38! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0s3z7UrIGc&t=3600s)

  4. Started learning the first solo in GnR’s cover of Knockin’ on heavens door. This song has so many things I can learn! It also gave me a good reason to start shopping for my first pedal board :wink:

  5. Vocal lesson #2 today. Worked on solfège, interval recognition, Let It Be, and “gliding” from one note to another. For some reason I can sing better in some vowel sounds (la la la) than others (ee, oo). I wasn’t able to hit the right notes for Let It Be in the key of C, but my teacher said I always hit the (lower) third of the higher notes when I couldn’t go high enough :grin::sweat_smile:. If I ever start a band, I shall call it Accidental Harmonies.

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24

I heard it, and I really liked your performance.

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25

Thank you Withold! That really means a lot!

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26

I started learning the first solo from GnR’s cover of Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door last weekend, and wanted to log my progress so far… so here’s a short video.

https://youtube.com/shorts/EShC795zy_Q

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27

Very nice Ashu! :slightly_smiling_face: This was the second solo I learnt, just after Let it be. You got the notes down and phrasing is recognizable.
As you are building speed and fluency, listen to the solo a lot - there are many details here. The first bend is pre-bent note and release. You need to bend the note silently to the pitch, play it at the top and then release the note. Also, Slash doesn’t pick quite a few notes here, they are played as hammer ons and flick offs.
Those three bends on the high E string fret 17 (A note) are played with two picks only - try to listen to this part in the original. He intentionally left those “seagulls” in his bending - he does this a lot in his solos and it sounds amazing.
He uses legato here not for speed, but to create this smooth/mellow transition from note to note. It is good that you started practicing this clean, so you can properly hear notes, bends, phrasing. However, you will need a tone with much more gain and distortion to be able to play nicely the parts I mentioned above. These are all details, but as you progress you should have them in mind.

Use your Les Paul for this, that is an absolute must! :grin: I know the bending is not easy at higher frets, but definitely doable with practice.

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28

Thanks for listening and the detailed feedback and tips!

Yes I need to switch to the Les Paul for this one!

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29

Very much recognizable already Ashu…I just can say well done and keep on enenjoying it! I leave the electric guitar advice to Boris and just echo the

It always work no matter the genre! First slow down the speed to work out all the details and make accurate slow practice…and then once you have it down your fingers listen to the full speed recording…it also helps in my experience to make your finger go faster on what they’re already able to do at a lower bpm.

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30

Okay here’s another attempt at this solo, near the end of week two.

Here you go :slight_smile:

Tried that this time.

I’ve tried to be mindful of this.

This part of the solo is indeed challenging. I’ve tried listening to this a lot, to the point where I can hum or whistle the melody. But recreating that on the guitar… oh my! I think I got the seagulls this time. Not sure if I got to pitch on these bends :slight_smile: I should record myself near the start of my practice session with fresher fingers!

In general, I am still playing ‘by ear’, rather than reading the tab - I wasn’t sure how to read the rhythm but @Dave_Birnie sorted that out in this week’s lesson! My next log entry should hopefully show progress on that front.

(Dave, I @mentioned you so you could find my learners log)

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31

Great Ashu, I can hear the changes. :slightly_smiling_face: Some are done better than others, but the main thing here is that you have them now in your mind and you can practice them. Keep practicing until you are reasonably fast so you can play along with slow backing track. I usually play first with slowed down (Transcribe! or YT slow down) original, as hearing the original guitar helps me with timing and phrasing. Once I can play close to full speed, I use backing track (YT backing track or Moises). You will discover soon what comes easier to you and what are the tricky parts. You can then dedicate some time to work on those tricky parts separately. Also, once you add the distortion/gain you will see that muting becomes tricky and you can work on that.

This is very exciting time for you and you have a lot of motivation now. However, playing this over and over can become boring. You need to keep at it - prepare your mind set for a marathon. :slightly_smiling_face:

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32

Nice one, Ashu. Thanks for tagging me so I could check out your video.

I would agree with @Boris1565. The next thing you should try is playing along with the track. Use transcribe or something similar. Start at a comfortable tempo and gradually work it up to speed. You’ll learn so much from playing along with the actual track. You’ll subconsciously start copying Slash’s phrasing and dynamics.

Using some overdrive/distortion would be beneficial too. It would help the notes sustain and would force you to really make sure the unused strings are muted correctly.:+1:

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33

Thanks Dave, makes sense!

Time to buy some pedals, I’ve only got a looper!

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34

Mission accomplished!

35

It’s been a busy summer! Jotting down some highlights for my future self to remember when I hit the next plateau :slight_smile:

  • Completed the Folk Fingerstyle module… well almost I am trying to come up with a simple chord melody arrangement of Let It Be, before I tackle Waltzing Matilda.

  • I have continued to explore the fretboard and major/minor/pentatonic scales, and the CAGED system… all thanks to Dave Birnie’s wonderful lessons!

  • I decided to use “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” as a learning vehicle, rather than a song that I will get “performance ready” this year. There’s so much to learn – arpegiatted chords, octaves, octave slides, power chords, the solo itself. And I have used the solo as a way to learn the fretboard and find melodies in “other places” – I try to play the solo all over the neck, and its been a great way to let my fingers find the right note without thinking about what note it is and where it might be in the scale pattern… and sometimes you can’t bend a note to the next note easily so you have to slide or hammer-on or something else.

  • I attended my second Justin Guitar workshop. No impostor syndrome this time, lol. I learnt a lot, met old friends, made new ones! I played and sang Sweet Virginia and We are gonna be friends during evening OM’s, and along with my bandmates, the “Road Trippers” performed End of The Line, Mad World, Let It Be and Take Me Home, Country Roads.

  • A friend from the workshop kindly invited me to join him at an Open Mic event. We played “Take me home, country roads” and managed to get some of the crowd to sing along. This was my first time playing at an OM that’s not part of this supportive community. It went well :slight_smile:

  • And this past weekend at a dinner party, I had my first ever “I hear you play guitar, play something for us” moment! The only guitar available hadn’t been played for years, but I managed to get it in tune, and do a couple of tunes from my campfire list. Folks liked it, and asked if I could “play along” to a couple of songs while they sang to a muted Karaoke setup. That wasn’t the train-wreck I feared it would be – I managed to find the chords on a website and could strum along with very basic patterns.

  • Hosted my second community OM!

  • Started learning “Nobody Knows You, When You’re Down and Out”, an acoustic, dare I say it, “Unplugged” arrangement.

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36

That’s awesome Ashu, good to see you’re making good use of the workshop skills.

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37

Thanks Rod!

Use them or lose them :wink: