By Justin’s definition, this song has been a grower/aspirational song for me from day one. The stretch from the Am - G and the rapidity of the chord changes seemed impossible in my early guitar days.
In the past six months or so I finally got that part, then decided to practice the other sections but really never thought about consolidating it. Yesterday I sat down, listened to the original track, and did a little “transcribing” if you can really call it that, just trying to figure out how many times they went through each section. I wrote it down, broke out the 1967 Harmony H1260, maybe the same model Jimmy Page used to compose this tune.
When I went to record it last night, suddenly I could not smoothly play the arpeggios at all, I kept going T-1-2-2 instead of T-1-2-3, it was so frustrating as I’d never made that mistake before, I just had so much tension in my hand, well I took a break and today I warmed up my fingers a bit and this is my one take. You can see me completely lose myself at one point but I love the dynamic possibilities in this tune and will continue to work on this one, and maybe get it down where I can entertain the idea of singing/humming the melody.
Hi Dale,
You are in your early day`s …well well
There’s a lot going on in this song and you’re doing it really great, your fingerstyle is smooth
Greetings ,Rogier
Dale, what a fantastic one-take. You’re right about the possibilities of the song, so much dark and shade and light and soft and loud and more. Your hard work and selcective practice of parts has paid off and you’ve developed it to a good standard. Kudos and good vibes for this.
Excellent, very good playing and timing. I think it’s more of a candidate for singing to your own track and mixing it; it’s a complex composition that would make it so very easy to make mistakes. I’d be very interested to hear you playing and singing it if you do decide to go down that route!
Very nice start on this song. I was playing this for awhile after seeing someone else play it on the old Forum, and I found that I really had to get into it to be able to play the chord changes well. It’s a very expressive piece and you’re doing well.
Looks really hard, will put this on my list of “goal” songs.
When you practice, did you only focus on the song for six months, or do you do the song a bit and then work on other stuff?
I’ve been thinking about the Justin lessons on how to structure a practice, find that I get very caught up in working on a specific thing and whooops, where did that hour just go? Interested in hearing about your approach.
This is actually one I never gave any structured practice to. As I worked through the course, I just kept coming back to this song every few months and parts just got easier. I think I started really getting it about the time I was learning some finger picking patterns and Travis picking.
I really believe in the whole program, I think the work on the weak-fingered G and all of the Am to F chord change practice I did helped, as well as the finger gym and G major first position scale work, it all contributes to finger strength, stretch, and independence.
