Mark's Log of Learning

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I’ve been wondering what it is like to keep a learning log. Is it motivating or does it sometimes feel like a millstone around the neck? Leave your thoughts in the comment section below, as they say. Meanwhile, I am about to find out anyway, by jumping in and giving it a try.

Where to start? Probably right at the beginning is best, because I have come to music and the guitar by what now seems the oddest of routes.

As an early teenager I watched Top Of The Pops every week (I was living in the UK at that time), and would daydream about being a rock star with a white strat - I think I saw Marc Bolan with one. But it was punk that suddenly made me see that music was not just for mythical figures; anyone could do it.

I’d just started art school when popular music in the UK convulsed into something incredibly exciting - bands like The Damned, The Stranglers, and The Clash were playing songs I found electrifying. I lived in a hall of residence and in the room next to mine was a student with an electric guitar. On the other side of him, a lad had a bass. Amazingly, we were all left-handed. We became friends, discussed the new punk bands incessantly and talked about forming a band. I began writing lyrics. The bassist was happy to lend me his bass. I played it on my bed until my fingers were sore. Meanwhile, I’d quickly realised that nearly everyone at art school was a musician, and that if I wanted to be part of all that I should avoid the guitar - I would simply become the newest and least able of an oversupply of guitarists. But I learnt that everyone needed a bass player!

Next, I’ll tell you how I picked up music theory.

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Alone in my room with a borrowed bass, I was pitifully short on training materials, so I just made up my own bass lines - fragments that sounded good enough to me - and attempted to play them often enough to embed the memory, and fast enough to sound exciting. I couldn’t tune the instrument. I had no radio or record player. Playing tips from my guitarist friend were intermittent. Even if I’d had sheet music, I didn’t know how to read it.

So I did what I always did when I was trying to learn something new: I bought a book. Near the art college, on Berry Street, was a small secondhand bookshop that I recall was called Waterstone’s, though my memory may be suspect. There, I found a music text book published in the 1880s (yes, already nearly a century old). It started by identifying concert pitch and its alternatives, then swiftly moved on to temperaments, harmony, and so on. I just started at the beginning and worked my way through it. Meanwhile, the other lads and I were regularly attending riotous punk gigs at Eric’s, a newish basement club in Mathew Street. The contrast between my experience of music and my study of it could not have been more extreme.

The result of my study was that I knew, for example, what a 13th chord comprised well before I could hope to play it. This led to a couple of odd occasions where a guitarist would complain that a piece he was learning required a D13, say, but the only fingerings shown in his chord book (does anyone remember them?) were too far from the position where he was playing on the neck. I was able to suggest a fingering based on principles I learnt from my book. At first, the reaction would be to ignore me, a mere learner bass player, then to grudgingly admit that some of what I suggested seemed to work, and finally amazement that I could somehow pull chords out of thin air, without ever having played a guitar!

On returning home for the Christmas holidays that year I was surprised to find that my (right-handed) brother had bought a fairly decent Fender Mustang copy. It was red with white stripes. I played it upside-down - mainly riffs like Smoke on the Water, a couple of awkwardly reversed chords, and plenty of vibrato on the whammy bar. That was my first taste of six strings.

I recall guitar-specific books being used along the way, too. At this moment I am looking through my old stained copy of A Tune A Day For Guitar Book 1. What a dry and plodding way to learn that was! Still, it was the norm for the time. Inside the back cover is a diagram I made showing where the natural notes appear on the guitar fretboard. There is also a simple melody of mine painstakingly written out in treble clef.

So within a few months, I had assembled some lyrics, an assortment of simple bass lines, easily fingered open chords (E, Em, Am, Asus2, G and G6; the rest still too difficult), and a pretty sound understanding of harmony, meter, notation, etc. I’ve always been surprised at guitarists’ reluctance to learn this part, the theory, when I found it so very helpful in getting started in music.

Next time I will cover my struggles with first learning songs, and starting to play with others.

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Having been a teenager in the south of England when punk started, and going to as many gigs as I possibly could at that time (I couldn’t always get in to the venues where you had to be 18), I was lucky to get in to see the clash, the damned (even under age) and saw the stranglers over 20 times before the Cornwall/JJ Burnel line up split.
I have enjoyed reading your log as live music was so accessible then and yes everybody (especially those at art collège) were learning to play guitar or bass.

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Sharing a bass wasn’t enough; I needed one of my own. I bought a secondhand Ned Callan Custom bass. it was symmetrical and thus easily converted to left-hand use. One of the machine heads didn’t work, so I replaced them all. I reversed the strings and the nut. I soon also bought a 100W amp and a 4x12 cab. By now I was sharing a house with two guitarists, also left handed, and talk of forming a band was getting more serious. One day in the pub I mentioned that I had thought of a good name, The Gods. Suddenly things felt real. One of the guitarists came back from the holidays with enough songs for a whole set. We advertised for a drummer and began practicing in a youth club in Wallasey. The local kids pestered us to let them sit in on the rehearsals, and they became our first fans. One day we saw they had spray-painted THE GODS in letters four feet high on a wall facing the Mersey.

I found that I needed to write out simple chord progression charts as mnemonics when learning songs. This was generally (though not always) enough for me to remember all the details of my part. Something like this:

E     /     B     E       x2
C#m   A     B     E
C#m   A     B     /

(That’s the start to Complete Control by The Clash).

It has always amazed me that by chunking things this way, a musician can remember the thousands of notes that make up an hour-long set, and play them in exactly the right order (most of the time).

We started playing art school events and pubs. I never had nerves before these gigs; I was always just raring to go. There is nothing quite as exhilarating as playing to a crowd who are on your side. Eventually, we supported Sham 69 at Eric’s. At this gig, I suddenly forgot where I was in the middle of a song. The onstage sound was deafening, so one of the guitarists turned to me so I could see what he was playing, but seeing the odd A or B position under strobe lighting wasn’t much use either. It didn’t matter, the skinheads liked us and helped us load our van afterwards. Several of them came up to congratulate us. I was high on adrenaline.

We changed the band’s name, first to The Famous Names when we learnt that The Gods and even The Godz had already been taken, and then simply The Names, which is how we became known around the college. But the end came all too soon; the guitarist, singer and main songwriter decided he wanted to focus on art, not the band, and we just fell apart.

Throughout this time I hardly ever played anyone else’s songs. I usually couldn’t work them out or, having done so, do them justice, or even manage the fingering. I learnt scraps, such as the classic bass lines of Sunshine of Your Love; Police and Thieves, River Deep, Mountain High and other Motown hits (which I’ve always loved) but very little of this was done by ear.

At the end of the course I organised a concert at the college, forming a one-off band to play Motown classics. Initially there were about 20 of us rehearsing together, but I think only about 12 made it to the big night.

How I managed to get through this convincingly, I don’t know. During rehearsals I was forever at the absolute edge of my abilities. One of the singers would bring in lyric sheets with chords marked, and I suppose I had enough bass licks down by then to fill in my part. I learnt that there are simple and difficult ways to play a part, so I would start simple, by just playing the root note on the down beat, perhaps, and later complicate things to taste.

The gig was immense fun. At the first few notes of the set, the crowd simply flowed towards us with an audible reaction. It was a joyous way to finish life at college, and sowed the seeds of the next venture, because a few of us later started playing together in the band that would become A Formal Sigh.

I think I will cover all that at a later stage, as this is already quite a lengthy post.

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That is a very interesting story to read Mark…looking foward to the sequel.

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This is possibly the most interesting beginning to a learning log I’ve seen here! It’s really an fascinating read!

Remember the “Harry Potter” books and how we had to wait for the next sequel? My pre-teenage daughter (huge HP fangirl) had us waiting at the bookstore just before midnight when the store re-opened - just for the next book’s release!!!

This log is starting to get that vibe… c’mon Mark!!! We want to know what happened next!!! :grin:

Tod

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A few months after college, one of our Motown singers called round to ask if I was interested in starting a new band. So we did. I had a backlog of music and she supplied the lyrics. My bass lines had become quite idiosyncratic by this time, but her vocal parts added appeal to them. We recruited two guitarists and a drummer and, in my opinion, became a rather original and interesting band. We called ourselves A Formal Sigh. I thought we had a big future ahead of us.

The singer and I remained the driving force for the first year or so. I felt it necessary to bring lots of material to rehearsals, and to book as many gigs as possible. I used to call phone numbers in the gig guides in the weekly music papers (NME, Sounds, Melody Maker) and make bookings with whoever would take us. This took us to some out-of-the-way places in the north of England.

One evening we were due to play at a pub that turned out to be high on the moors. Approaching this desolate spot we had gothic forebodings, mist was gathering and the sun had just set. Some way ahead on the deserted lane we saw the pub lights, and the gleam of about 200 motorcycles lined up outside. We stopped and debated whether we should just bail out and head back to Liverpool right away. No, we decided to go ahead and play, we’d skip all the lighter numbers and play the rest as hard as we could. As we were carrying our gear into the pub a few bikers looked us up and down and asked, ‘You are heavy, right?’ and we said of course we were.

We thrashed through the set and everything seemed to be going well. The singer even did the cliche things of telling the audience how great they were and introducing the band members one by one, and we each responded with a mini solo, grinning at each other. When we finished the set we were cheered and applauded - and not beaten up. It was a great gig!

One night in Manchester, we first supported The Thompson Twins, in front of their fans, and then moved our gear to a rather more sophisticated kind of club on the floor above to open for Q-Tips.

But playing to our home audience, students and other savvy new-wave gig-goers around Liverpool, our gigs sometimes seemed to drag lifelessly. I felt it was my job to provide the propulsion, but the band rarely generated the excitement The Names had had right from the start. I thought all such problems were fixable, but it seems some of the band thought we were were not light enough, and wanted to go in a different direction.

By this time I had an acoustic guitar and could play barre chords. I’d learnt by copying other guitarists, and presumably had developed sufficient finger strength through bass-playing. The guitar helped me to figure out chord sequences to complement my bass lines, enabling me to bring more fleshed-out ideas to the band. We booked studio time and recorded a couple of demo tapes. In 1981 we recorded a session for John Peel, and got played on the national and local radio a few times. We were front-page darlings of the leading fanzine on Merseyside, and a couple of local record companies were showing mild signs of interest.

And then it happened; two of the band suddenly left to form a duo and I, having had my fill of struggling to keep bands together (there had been others that failed to even get as far as their first gig) decided to quit music and head back to Australia.

The money I’d been saving to buy a brand-new active Ibanez bass went instead towards my air ticket. I left my old guitars behind and looked forward to a simpler band-free future.

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Really interesting read Mark, it sounded like you certainly had a fun time.

.I too had my experience of trying to keep a band together in the early 80’s although not at your level of performance, and leaving one because it was heading in a musical direction I did not want to.

The last band I helped set up with a fellow house sharer(keyboards) was getting on quite well, and we hired a Prophet 5 synth to try out,. The owner of the synth had a small recording studio in Tooting and offered us a free demo session and possibly management after hearing a few songs of us on cassette. It was arranged for a Sunday, we all turn up apart from the 17 year old bass player, who had gone to a party in East London and had forgotten. That was it everyone was very p*****d off, and it killed the band.

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For five years I didn’t touch another instrument.

After living for a while in both Australia and the USA I found myself alone in a London hotel, back in England to start a new job. It was January 1987. I knew no one in London, and driving back to the hotel through drizzle every evening I felt completely empty. I don’t know why, but music started to draw me back again. This time, however, I would go solo. I couldn’t face all the dashed hopes, work, disagreements, fence-mending, compromise and eventual dissolution of another band.

I bought a synthesiser (Ensoniq ESQ-1) that had a built-in sequencer, allowing me to record one part into memory, then switch sounds and play another. It could record and replay eight separate parts, allowing a live player to add a ninth part. Pretty amazing, and a complete solution to my new asocial approach to music. Each evening and at weekends I would compose and record in my hotel room, while waiting to move into permanent accommodation. When I eventually bought an apartment, I set up a simple studio in one of the bedrooms and began committing music to tape. Here I had the synth, my old bass and acoustic, bongo drum, Fostex four-track recorder, amp and a big pair of speakers.

I did make a couple of synth friends during these years, but we never really played together. We would just get together to show each other what we’d been doing. My playing, composition, and technical understanding grew throughout this time. I began to get interested in the practice of sound synthesis, and created some fairly useable synthetic sounds for flute, piano, organ and so on. I thought I would never need a guitar again, as all my ideas could be realised through synthesis, and edited if any imperfections bothered me.

Learning to play a keyboard instrument is useful for a guitarist, as the keyboard graphically demonstrates the structure of chords and inversions - everything is laid out linearly before your eyes and the pattern of black and white keys is as good as a set of labels. Chord relationships are completely obvious. There is only one key per note - so simple! You don’t even have to forgo bends and vibrato.

After three years of synthesising, I left England for the USA, in early 1990. The synth and other instruments went into storage, and music disappeared from my life for a second time. My interests simply shifted to other activities.

However, every so often, I would get an email out of the blue, along the lines of ‘are you the bass player of A Formal Sigh? I wish I had been in Liverpool at that time! Do you know where I can find more recordings of the band?’ These unexpected messages were often from people who had not even been born when the band was active! But I could never help them.

After about 10 years, one of these emails led to a re-encounter with the singer of A Formal Sigh, and access to our old master recordings. This gave me the idea of publishing the band’s material. I also still had an album’s worth of songs from my London synth days. I published two CDs through Amazon: A Far Cry by A Formal Sigh, and Half English by me, some time around 1999. Sales of both were extremely disappointing, to say the least.

So I am up to the turn of the millennium now. I think I’ll save the 2000s for another post.

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Another 20 years of musical inactivity passed, and then a bass line that I’d had in my head for a long, long time began to insist that I make it real. Why, after all this time? Who knows.

So, I pulled my old synth out from under the bed. I began doing a bit of online research to see the state of the art of digital recording, and I soon realised that these days I needed an audio interface and a DAW (digital audio workstation software) to get started. I’d used Cakewalk back in the 1990s while preparing the two CDs, so I was delighted to see it was still going and, what’s more, was now free yet professionally supported.

Once I had the DAW set up, I tried opening some of my twenty-year old Cakewalk files. To my astonishment they opened perfectly. How many other software packages could you say this of? Cakewalk is an impressive and versatile piece of software. (I use it every week to play backing tracks to my guitar playing. But I get ahead of myself.)

The first thing I wanted to do was record the nagging bass line. I did that. Then I wanted to record a lot of other ideas that started to pop into my head. The more I played with Cakewalk and my synth, the more ideas I had. I also went back to the old music manuscript book I’d been keeping before A Formal Sigh and resurrected most of my old unrecorded bass lines - transcribing my handwritten scores to MIDI files. Consequently, there are now literally dozens of WIP songs queued up for more attention.

After a year or so I acquired a new fully digital software recreation of my synthesiser, with far greater capabilities - this is the Arturia SQ-80 V. Then I thought it would be a good idea to collect all the thousands of publically available patches created for the ESQ-1 and SQ-80 synthesiser family and publish them as a free resource. This took longer than a year, but eventually I had something like 20,000 patches which, after the removal of duplicates and duds, turned out to be about 5,700 unique sounds. I wrote routines to convert them to database records, categorised them under a three-level taxonomy, and published the results. I also wrote routines to enable the loading and saving of ESQ-1 and SQ-80 patches into the Knobkraft Orm librarian software. User feedback was very positive.

I took several online piano courses during this period too, but ran out of steam after a few months. I am probably more of a composer than a player, I told myself. I do wish I’d persisted, though.

Meanwhile, my brother (he who had the Mustang copy back in the 1970s) had been buying and playing guitars from time to time. He now has seven or eight, mainly Telecasters. We both live in Sydney but only rarely play together. One day last year, he asked me whether I would play a Stratocaster if I had one. The idea appealed to me, so I said yes. I’d never had an electric guitar, so could never really play the type of guitar-oriented songs I like. He and our other brother bought me one last September. What wonderful generosity. It’s a left-hand sunburst SSS Fender Player Plus Strat. An instrument can really help or hinder your playing, and this one just feels right. Compared to my long-scale bass and dreadnought acoustic it is so easy to handle.

So now I have a good digital recording set-up, a guitar I really love, growing knowledge of the workings of effects pedals (though getting sounds I like is proving somewhat elusive), and the feeling that I have all the time I need to continuously improve.

And that’s why I am here. I can compose, I’ve performed live, I’ve heard myself playing on the radio, I have a small collection of instruments, but after half a century in and out of music I am still a novice when it comes to electric guitar.

Next time, I’ll quickly talk about the things I’ve most appreciated about the three beginner grades of Justin’s course, and at that point I think I will finally be up to date; any further additions to this log will then be contemporary.

For reference, here’s a quick recap of my musical eras:

  • 1976-1982 The Names, A Formal Sigh
    • 5 years dormant
  • 1987-1990 Synthesiser
    • 10 years dormant
  • 1999-2000 Two albums
    • 20 years dormant
  • 2021-2024 DAW and database
  • 2024-now Electric guitar

(It’s odd how the dormant periods keep doubling in length. I won’t have time for another in that particular series.)

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That’s the end of the backstory and, blimey!, it ended up a lot longer than I expected.

@Prof_Thunder Ian, I bet we’d have a lot to reminisce about if we ever met.
@Silvia80 Silvia, thanks, again, for your nice comment.
@CATMAN62 Tod, high praise indeed. I hope you found the rest just as interesting.
@AJSki2fly Adrian, thank you and yes, there was a lot of fun along the way, but deep frustration too, as you also know.

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Thanks so much for your back story. It was a very interesting read, and interesting that it took you a long time to try the electric guitar. I’m sure that with your musical knowledge and also knowing several instruments, you are going to learn very fast.

Wondering why your brother got you a Strat if he’s so into teles? Both are great. You will enjoy working out how to get different tones out of it. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before you find the tones you want.

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I’m joining the choir of those, who enjoy reading your Learning Log

Which of the instruments, you played or have played, do you enjoy playing most?

Does knowing how to play bass make learning guitar seem easier? How? Did you use a pick when playing “punk bass”?

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@Prof_Thunder Ian,

Hmmm. I cannot answer the question about Strats vs. Teles. Maybe I’d once mentioned to him that I like Strats.

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Thanks @jokumuu, Nicole .

At the moment, it’s all about the Strat. I really do like it.

When I pick up the bass now it seems heavy, unbalanced, and bit of a stretch to reach the notes. I did love playing it live, though. You can see the shock on people’s faces when they feel their chests resonating. As you guessed, I was a pick player back then. I mix it with finger style nowadays.

Knowing the bass gave me a slight head start in finding positions for notes and chords, but only on four of the six strings. Actually it sometimes mixes me up too. I used the ninth fret on the high string of my bass as a reference, because it is an E, and I wrote most of my songs in keys with a lot of E notes. The rule doesn’t transfer to a six-string guitar because the ninth fret on the high E is a C#. The bass also made me keenly aware of maintaining rhythm and tempo. The length of a long-scale bass meant that the finger stretches Justin covered fairly early in the course were a doddle for me. I have large hands anyway, so that too helped. So, to give you a short answer: yes, bass helps.

The synth is under its dust-cover at present. I almost started playing it today but decided to avoid the temptation. I use it primarily as a composing tool. My keyboard skills frustrate me more than anything else. Instead, I am looking forward to playing the guitar later this evening.

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Here are the most valuable lessons I’ve learnt so far in this course:

  1. Putting the index finger on the G string when playing open A. This makes moving between open D and A, or open E and A, so simple. Being able to alternate A and D fast got me spontaneously playing White Riot by The Clash.

  2. Using an anchor finger to assure chord changes.

  3. Otherwise, imagining the chord shape in mid-air, briefly hovering before pressing down on the strings together. I still tend to apply fingers sequentially, so this is something to work on.

  4. Providing songs I like as examples - great to have Anarchy in the UK included. You wouldn’t get that back in the 70s!

  5. Focusing on and practicing the hard bits repeatedly, rather than going back to the beginning every time I make a mistake.

  6. Slowing things down until I can play them perfectly. I used to have to keep up with others playing fast, so I would often let my playing slip and it became a bit of a habit. The metronome really serves a purpose here, to stop me unconsciously speeding up until I force an error. It’s only taken me fifty years to figure out why people bother with it.

  7. Keeping the strumming hand moving in time. I think my rhythm is pretty good already, but this really improves one’s playing.

  8. The stuck 3&4 chords. Great for Wish You Were Here. I am a bit of a Pink Floyd fan.

  9. Power chords (5s), sus2 and sus4. I never knew what a 5 was! And I used to think of sus chords as complications. They are not, they are simplifications.

On the other hand, there are things I am not interested in: twelve-bar blues, finger-picking styles, for example. I will have a go at them from time to time, but they are not what I want to play.

And then there is something I seem unable to do: transcribing. Or perhaps I should say that while all people can do it to some degree, better or worse, I am distinctly poor at it. This is frustrating the hell out of me because the course keeps returning to it and each time nothing more is taught. I’ve repeatedly tried to offer instructive feedback on this subject, in the hope that the developers of the course will go away and figure out better ways to teach the process. I live in hope.

Next time I pop in here it will be to describe what I am currently working on.

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You will love powerchords, when you really get into them. I like playing them - badly… and way too slowly. Aah… and with your bass skills you can even record your own bass tracks to provide the right rhythmn and structure. How great is that?!

I know that I will start learning bass at some point. I have been thinking about it for almost two years already. It’s just such a great instrument. Still… Given that I’m progressing with guitar so slowly, if at all, at the moment it would probably be more of a distraction than anything else.

I had seen your comments about transcribing in the other threads, and I can understand you very well. Learning to transcribe songs or learning songs by ear is high on my list. It is difficult though. I mean, I can get “Happy birthday” or “Jingle bells”, but anything more difficult than that… hmm…

My former in person guitar teacher is not only a brilliant guitarist, but also one the the nicest people I know. There were moments in our lessons, when I showed him certain songs that he hadn’t heard before, and he picked up the chord progressions in the correct keys almost instantaneously.

“How do you do that?” I asked him. “I want to be able to do that so much…” - and he couldn’t quite explain. Apparently it all boils down, to years of listening, trying, experimenting and practicing. Apparently such skills will come with time - bit by bit.

For me, this means that I’m at the moment trying to find time and energy for learning music theory. The more I know, the more I will be able to understand. For me, this also means that I’m trying to simplify my ear training as much as possible. E.g. with a song, where I know the chord progression for the first verses, I try to identify the chord progression for the chorus in a trial and error kind of way. In simple three of four chord songs, I try to identify the chords changes to the correct chords by ear… Just trying to listen more and to think less.

No idea, if such kind of simplification could help you? Maybe starting with seemingly ridiculously easy songs, experiencing nice moments of success and then very slowly progressing to more difficult songs could work? That’s at least what I keep telling myself :slight_smile:

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@JokuMuu
You mention overdubbing of different parts. I’ve been thinking of making a derivative recording of Why Can’t We Live Together? by Sade, replacing the guitar, bass and perhaps also the synth, one at a time, but keeping the vocal and drum parts from the original.

I realise I forgot to mention my acoustic guitar in answer to your earlier question about preferences. I never liked it much, because it was always hard to play. However, a few weeks ago, I got ambitious and started adjusting the truss rod and bridge height, and made it quite a bit better. So, the other day when I was practicing Greensleeves I switched to the acoustic. It sounded much better than the Strat, so it has its place.

That was also partly because I’m getting rather dissatisfied with my electric guitar tone(s). I’ve been trying out Overloud’s THU, which has some great tones, but is quite expensive. I could get it as part of a subscription to Cakewalk, but that would be even more expensive in the long run. I think I probably need to devote a whole post to that subject.

I started reading your learning log too! It is very pleasant to follow along with. I have to be careful not to spend more time reading about guitar than actually playing it!

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Having finished Grade 3, I’m taking a bit of a breather to review and improve what I’ve already started, before addressing the intermediate grades.

My current focus, if there is one, is to play single-note melodies alongside or within chords, being more careful with both my picking and strumming.

Some of the songs I am playing are:

  • Heaven, Talking Heads (a live acoustic and bass duet) *
  • Maggot Brain, Funkadelic (live version, playing arpeggios throughout)
  • Complete Control, The Clash (a hybrid of Strummer and Jones parts)
  • Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd (but not the solos)
  • One, U2 *
  • Free Fallin’, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (either Petty or Campbell parts)
  • Why Can’t We Live Together?, Sade version
  • Holy Grail, Hunters and Collectors

I’ve loaded these and maybe another 20 or 30 songs into a Cakewalk project that has my guitar on track 1, with a selection of optional effects set up. I solo whichever audio track (song) I want to play. One touch of the space bar starts and stops play. If I haven’t memorised the song, I use Ultimate Guitar to display tab or chords, or my music notebook if I’ve written out a chord progression chart.

I usually play songs all the way though, embellishing the guitar parts as well as I can manage. The * above indicates that I have evolved parts in my own way.

It occurs to me that I am sticking with habits from my past, none of which are particularly original:

  • Writing out chord progression charts
  • Readily modifying to my own taste and ability
  • Starting simple, embellishing over time
  • Playing at ‘performance’ tempo

I am wondering whether I should next talk about how I play, or the equipment I have set up, or perhaps try to set some markers that will help me assess progress in retrospect.

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… I hadn’t even been thinking that complicatedly.:slightly_smiling_face:

It’s funny with acoustics that way. I have an Epiphone dreadnought, which sounds nice, the action is just a bit too high, and it’s too big for me. So, as nice as it sounds, I never really loved it. Then I got my slim APX700ii, had it set up in the store, when I bought it - and I have loved this guitar more or less from the first moment. Thus, really glad that you managed to increase the playability of your acoustic.

I never started hunting tones yet. Amps etc. are such a huge rabbit hole for me… I know, I would fall into that hole and maybe come out after five years or so…

Oh, that thing… Just don’t expect to find any real progress there. Hmm, if anything it’s a testament to my love for music and the joy of going in circles. Or in spirales maybe?

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