2022-12-13
I successfully participated in JGC OM XII. I was able to play and sing El último beso, Last Kiss Spanish version, the best I can at the moment and the audience received well my performance. I initially planned to use the chords indicated in a magazine I have, but the chords looked to be at odds with the record, so I got help from my brother to get chords and phrasing right. I’m glad I didn’t have to deal with Eb7 for my debut at the Justin Guitar Community open mics 
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I shared a video from two years ago of my daughter and I playing live Los peces en el río (The fishes in the river), a villancico de navidad (Christmas carol) in Spanish. That was my only previous experience playing live (for a virtual audience or else of non close relatives).
My daughter and I successfully participated in JG Xmas Bash 2022. A la nanita nana sounded good despite the volume of the sound of the guitar and my daughter’s voice being a bit low (I may have forgotten to turn off the echo cancellation setting). Unexpectedly sometimes it sounded like there was someone playing a tambourine 
. My wife did a recording while we were playing which sounds more like what I had recorded the night before.
Although having a song performance ready and actually performing it in public are excellent guitar exercises, I think that my Level 9 practice could be needing a little push to be able to move on. I will pause with the open mics for now, but I’m already thinking what I could play for the next one I participate.
One spontaneous comment from the audience during my OM participation was “Not a beginner anymore :)”. I’ve been wondering even before that when I could call myself an intermediate player (other than when in a future I could be doing the intermediate grades of Justin Guitar). My latest thought is that there is not going to be a set date, beginner before that, intermediate after that. I am already fluent at my level with some guitar skills and should be more fluent with others as the time and practice passes by.
The skills that would be making me feel a more advanced player are being able to transcribe and being able to transpose on the fly. Beginner Grade 3 includes some transcription practice so when I graduate from that level I should be on the right path to consider myself an intermediate player. I have still plenty of work ahead finishing Level 9, later exploring select Grade 1 and Grade 2 content and finally consolidating what I would have learnt till that moment.
I surprised myself the other day by being able to play and sing the whole Yellow Submarine song by just looking at the chord sequence, without the lyrics in front of me. It was not planned; I just started with Verse 1, that I was already able to do it that way, and carried on till the end. There are some rough spots yet and this was without the backing track, so I expect some fun when the backing track is back into the equation.
I’ve kept practicing the first fifteen bars of the simplified version of Asturias. My goal is still to post in the AVOYP whenever I feel more fluent with it. I think is time to bring the metronome back in. I had used it at the beginning while learning the first three bars, but after adding more bars there was no point of using it until I could have somewhat memorized them
I almost can play the short version of Habanera from memory. The same than with Asturias now the metronome can be beneficial, in this case to polish the main melody before adding the bass accents.
Once I’m done with Yellow Submarine, and post a video of it, I would like to tackle A Horse With No Name to work on a strumming pattern that spans two bars.