Okay, so, my OMCs are averaging between 55 and 62, sometimes on a good day, a couple will hit 70, but they’d be so sloppy I sometimes don’t bother counting them. But they aren’t really helping with my Grade 1 consolidation, so I altered my routines today to include:
finger stretching - 2 minutes
chord perfect changes/air changes - 6 minutes (as for air changes, hahaha, sometimes 2 fingers will go down at once but only E and Am are reliable as 3 finger transitions, and of course, A, D and E with the anchor fingers go pretty smoothly.
strumming old faithful while trying to change chords practicing with muted strings wasn’t helping me progress - 4 minutes,
strumming 6:8 while trying to change chords - no songs to play for this one so it’s not as important to me currently but I’m keeping at it.
Ear training - 5 minutes - Happy Birthday is getting pretty old but I keep hammering at it on different parts of the fretboard. I am sure this is supposed to do something for me in the future, I just don’t see it yet. ![]()
then my 5 songs which are now:
For What it’s Worth - Buffalo Springfield
What’s Up - 4 non blondes
Cortez the Killer - Neil Young
Wish you Were Here - Pink Floyd
Mary Jane’s Last Dance - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
I relegated Wild Thing and Stand by Me to what I call Consolidation Part 2. Stand by Me is still too fast for me to make good chord changes (I’m barely managing it at 90% and that is poorly) and Wild Thing has a chorus that keeps screwing up my strumming. I’ll work on these and others I have mentioned earlier in my log when I have more free time, but for memorization the 5 songs listed up above seem to be the ones.
Speaking of strumming, I can’t seem to do old faithful within a song successfully yet, every so often I try but it often becomes chaos. I’ll keep trying we’ll see what happens, but I’ll need a lot more practice.
Now I have watched the first lesson in Grade 2 though I haven’t put any of it into practice. I’m going to really push my song practice for the next couple of weeks, more than 10-12 minutes per song as I am doing now before I start Grade 2 officially, but I think Grade 2 will be sooner rather than later as I’m starting to feel like I’m stagnating a little bit.