Long time without posting a recording here … Here’s my beginner’s rendering of Country Roads, a classic by John Denver.
There is a bit of a story to this one: I first stumbled upon this on the Justin app more than a year ago, looked at the chords and thought “how hard can it be?”. Was I in for a surprise … I struggled a lot to keep a solid tempo; tried recoding it a couple times and never sounded good.
Fast-forward to 2024, I picked it up again and while there was some struggling involved, I think I did a decent job, even if using only the “old faithful” pattern all throughout the song.
My next goal for this song is to start learning to pick the base notes, end even alternating the base notes, as Justin suggests in his tutorial.
The same happened to me… One of the songs I tried on the app and ended up thinking… Hmm… Maybe later
Old faithful sounded good, relaxed and for the most part exactly on time. Your strumming was flowing along nicely. Looking forward to hear the version with the alternating picked bass notes.
Hi Claudio, nice and consistant strumming, looks pretty relaxed.
I also was quite surprised when I started, how fast this song is. When I had the rhythm down, I moved to alternating strumming patterns (I used the song for the Strumming SOS course, to try out different things). It didn’t take me too long to get the strumming under my belt and I was quite happy, just to realise, that I’m not really able to sing this song , seems to be out of my vocal range… so for me, it will be a work in progress too.
Keep on and I’m looking forward to hear you picking out the bass notes (you reminded me, that I should do this myself…thanks!)
Very well done Claudio! Your strumming sounds consistent to me. This is one of my 5 songs to memorize for grade 1 and I sometimes play it slightly slower than the original and it seems to work at various tempos. Keep up the good work!
That was good Claudio. Very good rhythm throughout, smooth chord changes and maybe too much of the exactly same pattern for the whole song. Some variation with bass note picking / strumming will be the next level - I am looking forward to seeing that.
First, let me extend a heartfelt thank you to all who read/listened/replied: you all rock!
That’s a Memphis MG-230; Memphis is the entry line by Brazilian instrument maker Tagima. It’s definitively a budget guitar, but after a trip to the luthier for proper setup, it feels very nice (at least in my unexperienced hands)
That’s still in my list of things I need to accomplish: as soon as I try singing I almost immediately lose the strumming. I will probably need to go back to one strum per bar and then try to sing along, but so far this has been eluding me
It may take me some time to get there, but I will certainly update this thread once I get there. The journey is fascinating, as you can always look to the next goalpost with a mixture of nervousness and anticipation
Great job, Claudio. To me your strumming sounded spot on. Yeah, I believe, as you say, next steps are to vary the strumming pattern and get those bass notes in.
I love your set up in the background. Awesome to have that second monitor.
My usual setup for recording is having the backing track playing in Audacity to my headphones, and at the same time recording what I play into a new track. The video is captured on my phone, so I have to mix the two together later, which I do in VSDC.
I mostly work from home, so that doubles as my work setup, and the large monitor is a must. It actually used to be two external monitors, but one recently gave up the ghost
, seems to be out of my vocal range… so for me, it will be a work in progress too.