Heckler's Learning Log

[heckler]

Update for Jun 2025: I started working on “Smoke on the Water” in late April (on the 24th, according to my note on the tab). Getting the solo passable at full tempo was a HARD challenge, and by mid-Jun I decided that it was as good as it was going to get with my current skillset, so I recorded an AVOYP of it to mark the milestone:

Smoke on the Water - Deep Purple - AVOYP

This one was a loooong time coming. I started practicing this song in the end of April, and the rhythm guitar was not very complicated to learn. So, I decided to attempt the solo. And it took me a few weeks to learn it completely at a leisurely 60% tempo, and then almost forever to be able to play it at full tempo. While I spent longer than planned learning the solo, it was a great experience; in the process I had to switch some of the phrases around to make the fingering easi…

Now I’m moving on to different things for a while, I’m practicing Father and Son (Cat Stevens), which is relatively simple, with two things that I need to work on:

1. Some mid-bar chord changes that require an effort to get the timing right
2. The dynamics: first time I played I quickly realized that my “normal” strumming is much to hard for this song, I need to learn a “feather-light” strum to get the quiet parts of the song to sound ok, and that has been proving hard! (I can get it if I strum with my fingers, but I want to get the right technique with a plectrum worked out)