Mark's Log of Learning

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103

This log clearly isn’t serving as an accountability warden; today I’m working on Marquee Moon again, and I realise, upon reading back, that I started working on this song in October 2025! Not exactly the most sedulous of guitar students. If I’d embarked on this project with any kind of deadline in mind, I clearly would have missed it some time ago. What this tells me is that I really don’t care for that sort of thing.

Anyway - on to the important stuff. I’m concentrating today on the rather dreamy section that comes at the end of the Verlaine solo. I’ve always loved this passage, so it is a thrill to be able to play it, albeit haltingly. Not only does it have an intrinsically transcendent feel, but it comes as a great relaxation of tension after an increasingly edgy solo. It’s only today that I noticed that the tension building during Verlaine’s solo is partly due to the band subtly raising the tempo - at least I think that’s what is happening.

The open-string chord sequence of the passage is really quite easy, but beautiful nonetheless. Somehow the change from D to Em, in particular, is full of richness. The difficult part is playing Verlaine’s arpeggios over it. They are triads played in rapid triplets, like shining drops of rain.

The way this song is constructed is so good; the parts are relatively simple, but the whole is something else entirely. This is exactly the kind of guitar playing that I want to do, and exactly the kind of song I want to write around the guitar. So why haven’t I been more focused on it over the last four months?

Ah, well. That’s another thing. I’m plagued by dissatisfaction with how cleanly I play, and much of the last few weeks I’ve been trying to hone my picking and strumming on simpler songs (all of which have also been in metaphorical pieces on my figurative workbench for many weeks). I won’t bother listing them all again, you ought to know what they are by now! I didn’t think that Marquee Moon would also be a good song to practice skills on, but it is. I can try to memorise these arpeggios and incorporate them into my practice sessions.

As for the guitar in general, most of the time things have been going well. However, there were a couple of days this week when I felt I couldn’t play a thing, and each time I ended up putting the guitar down fairly quickly. After two consecutive sessions like this I began to wonder about the wisdom of trying to learn this game. Then, out of nowhere, a great session followed. Does this teach me anything? Yes, I suppose so, but I can’t help feeling hugely frustrated at times.

I should probably sign off now, but there is one other thing to mention. The effect that I created on my Pocket Master over the holidays began to boom terribly, I thought. Funny how a good thing one day sounds awful the next (and vice versa). So, I got into the EQ module and dragged some of the lower bands down until I was happy with the balance. Then, I decided to compare it with the old version, and couldn’t make my mind up which was worse (or better, for that matter). Going round in circles with guitar effects is something I’m getting used to.

Now I really will finish.

104

Well NAMM 2026 came and went; a febrile gala of guitar influencers gushing over wood-grain and paint jobs. Isn’t obsession with appearance the very definition of decadence? Morbid curiosity must be the reason I watch so many of those YouTube guitar videos, because there is nothing else for me there. I at least lean back and play my guitar while I watch.

Sonicake released a beefed-up better-spec stage-based successor to the Pocket Master. At first I was mildly irritated, but I don’t really care, and won’t be replacing my PM. In fact, I gained a deeper appreciation of it today. A friend has fixed my broken Nu-X Mighty Plug headphone amp (the one I ripped in half by clumsily tugging it out of my Strat). There is quite a gap in quality between the two devices.

Enough of gear.

I don’t suppose any of you really need to hear, just as last week and the week before, that I continue to play the songs I work on, practice exercises and try to improve my blending of strums and picking. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next time I post here, I’ll be saying exactly the same thing all over again.

The point is, however, that I am both enjoying myself and improving. The magic ingredient seems to be… actually spending time on the guitar. Imagine that! And, perhaps just as important, taking a break and coming back to it a day later.

There have been a few more plaintive posts in the wider forum; learners fretting about whether they are working hard enough, can handle working hard enough, are working on the right things in the right ways, are going fast enough or slow enough, or wondering whether one day they will suddenly feel like they are getting it. Relax and play, I say.

Why do people take up guitar anyway? For me, unlike when I first started, these days I cannot really answer that question. Perhaps it seems like another good way to give me focus and occupy my time. I’m definitely not playing because I like the idea of being a guitarist. But as for others… I think those who simply like the idea of it are bound to fall by the wayside. It doesn’t come easy if your only payoff is impressing other people.

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105

Feel free to describe in more detail what you practice, which songs you play, and your thoughts on them. We share the same hobby and enjoy reading the stories of other fellow musicians.

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106

Fender finally started rebranding Presonus products, including the Studio One DAW. Where this affected me was that the software that tends to my Presonus audio interface (called Universal Control, a touch megalomaniacal), now has a new main version number, a new look, a new logo - and didn’t work when I installed it. After a few expletives and Luddite grumblings, I decided to do a restart of my entire computer and was relieved to see that the software then actually recognised the device it is supposed to be looking after.

Fender was smart enough to merge my two account pages, so it’s nice to see my guitar, audio interface and monitors all together on my personal ‘My Gear’ page for the first time. Although why Fender decided to dilute their image is beyond me. It looks like a potential marketing vulnerability, since software reputations are far less enduring than those of guitars.

A couple of my archery friends are coming around this week to see my guitar and recording set up. One plays flute and the other plays sax. Maybe we could do a rendition of Jerusalem together (‘bring me my bow of burning gold, bring me my arrows of desire’). It’s interesting that so many of the archery club are also musicians. At one time we had three cellists in the club. I joked that they should make a video of themselves as a trio all using their archery bows to bow their instruments, promising it would go viral. For some reason they didn’t do this.

Yeah, but what about my playing? It’s always improving, it seems. I can now do a fairly decent job of keeping rhythm while picking out the arpeggios of ‘I’m On Fire’ and my renditions of the post-solo arpeggios in ‘Marquee Moon’ are beginning to sound a bit more like music and less like the rapid dripping of a tap. Besides that, I am trying to improve the efficiency of my fretting movements on the ostinato of ‘Don’t Fear The Reaper’. And just this evening I went back to ‘I’m Coming Out’ and managed to play the Nile Rodgers riff better than ever before.

It’s so interesting to watch this process. By practicing more than usual in the last few weeks, I am seeing improvement across the board, even on songs I’ve neglected for some time. It all seems to be due to pushing back the limits of my control over my fingers by keeping up the pressure to play things that are hard for me.

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107

Whether archery or stringed instruments… it seems it’s all about plucking strings :bow_and_arrow:

108

Exactly. Twang twang!

109

I was casually strumming away, alternating between Asus4 and A, and suddenly realised this sounded like ‘April Sun in Cuba’ by Dragon, who I remembered as a 1970s Australian band. It turns out they are from New Zealand and are still going. Anyway, the point is that this was another instance of recognising not just the relationship between chords, but also hitting upon the absolute pitch, because the song does actually use the same chords: Asus4 and A. It’s odd how often this sort of thing happens while just fiddling around on the guitar.

But this makes me wonder. Why do I only seem to recognise songs in my own playing when I hear all the elements (sequence, rhythm and key) together? If I had a better ear, would I be able to spot the song even if I were playing it in a different key?

Something new that has emerged: my hands are frequently getting cramped and aching with the amount of practice I’ve been doing lately. I don’t think this is sustainable and my response is to try to lighten up, not in how much I play, but in both how hard I fret and how hard I pick and strum. I’ve definitely been overdoing the ‘hard’.

The musical soiree we planned this week unfortunately had to be postponed due to work and travel. We’ll try again soon. I am curious to see what they say about my guitar playing. I feel I am gradually shedding the ‘beginner’ mantle, but I’m aware how subjective and illusory such impressions can be.

The unnamed song I started writing a few weeks ago has been evolving nicely. It now has some descending arpeggios among the chords, so it is becoming quite a good thing to practice. Maybe I could call it ‘Right up my Alley’. It’s probably about time I recorded a version of it. I already have a bass line worked out, and can conceive of how two different guitar tracks might sound together, one spacey and the other a bit middle of the road (or alley, perhaps).

P.S. Blimey, I just had a look at my notes and see that I gave it the working title of ‘Second Dawn’! Why on earth would I choose such an AI-sounding title as that? Hmmm, I think I might know: when I audition it in MuseScore it has a majesty that the current version lacks.

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110

I am forced to reupload my ear training results due to forum editing restrictions.

Picture1
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Out of interest, I measured the pitch of the fixed initial note in these tests. It is a slightly sharp A2, and it appears the notes that follow are also sharp. I wonder if they were recorded off a real piano.

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111

I am a bit stuck with Justin Guitar.

Background

I skipped all the blues-oriented lessons in Grade 4, because I find blues dull, always have done, and have no interest in playing it. The most boring music I can ever remember playing is blues jams during band rehearsals.

I got as far as Grade 5, Major Scale Maestro 2 to find that it begins with Major Scale Pattern 4 and yet I really needed to return to Major Scale Maestro 1 in Grade 4, because Major Scale Patterns 1-3 appear to be prerequisites, and I cannot swear I remember enough of them.

Impasse

The Major Scale Pattern 1 lesson is, I rediscovered, an excruciatingly slow expose of… the major scale! J himself admits that he had no patience for this when he learnt it years ago. But anyway, I can play this up and down, alternate picking, eyes closed. I don’t understand the need for alternate picking, though. If I can play it, who cares how my pick moves? But let’s move on because any more of this and I will lose the will to live.

Pattern 2 doesn’t fall under the fingers quite as naturally. But playing it is almost putting me to sleep. And J wants us to do a week of this?! OK, I thought, I’ll try. I therefore hesitated to move on to the next module ‘Moving Between Scale Patterns’ but in the end decided I had to - before Pattern 2 practice sent me catatonic. So then J asked for feedback, and I went to the discussion for that module to paraphrase what I’ve just said here, and noticed a reference to:
https://www.justinguitar.com/guitar-lessons/when-not-to-learn-scales-sc-104
And apparently the time when not to learn scales is when you don’t see the purpose - exactly my problem right now.

So, do I learn these patterns or do I not? I really need an exploding head emoji here. :exploding_head:

Stuff it! Let’s have a look at pattern 3 anyway. It seems the ‘get out of jail free’ card is being able to make music out of these patterns, and I think I qualify on that score. Thankfully, the Major Scale Pattern 3 module is only seven minutes long…

As J suggests towards the end of this module, play in thirds. This is probably the least soporific approach for me. For now, though, I’ve really had enough, and will postpone Major Scale Maestro 2 to another day.

Ear training (see chart in previous post) has been much more fun, just lately!

112

Back so soon?

Well, as it happens, I decided to have another look at this business of major scale patterns or positions (they are the same thing). It is obvious that all we are doing is playing up and down a given major scale, assuming the hand is in one of 5 regions of the fretboard. There’s no magic spice. I figured that if that is all we are doing, I only need to know 5 different starting points for a given key, and which finger to start with. Staying with the key of G, I came up with the following:

Major Scale Patterns for G

Pattern	String	Fret	Finger	Range
1		6		3		2		2-5
2		4		5		2		4-8
3		5		10		4		7-10
4		5		10		2		8-13
5		6		15		4		11-15

The ‘range’ numbers are the band of frets the fingers have to cover for each position. This just helps me picture what I am doing a little better. Anyway, with this simple table, I effectively cover 3 lessons of Grade 4 Major Scale Maestro, 1 of Grade 5 Major Scale Maestro and 5 of Scales and Modes, Major Scale.

It seems odd to me that this material is scattered around across modules, and it doesn’t suit my preferred style of learning. I like to know how things fit in first, and what function they play - structure. Here’s an example. At the very start of the first class in a course of Neuroscience I took in the 1990s, the lecturer began with words I can recite almost verbatim 30 years later: ‘The nervous system is one of two great control systems in the body; the other being the endocrine system’. I remember feeling elated that I had the big picture right from the beginning.

So, thinking along these lines, I did some research and found a single webpage that treats major scale patterns in a similar fashion. Concise, structured, foundational information, clear diagrams, easily absorbed. I won’t advertise it here, but ask if you are interested. This resource confirmed my table data with some neck diagrams, nicely oriented.*

Here’s another issue with guitar tutorials: they all use right-handed diagrams for chords and scales. I can cope with the vertical ones OK, by just imagining that I am looking through the neck of the guitar at the underside of the fretboard. Funnily enough, we often look at the neck from the back anyway, so it makes this fairly natural. What I still struggle with is horizontal diagrams. But enough of my problems, what is the way forward?

I will do as I hinted yesterday: learn these patterns well enough, all at once, and then traverse the scale in thirds, up and down, up and down. That should keep me occupied for a week or two.

* It was only later that I found the same information in a download in Grade 5, Major Scale Maestro 2. I wish this had been made available earlier.

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113

For background to this post, check out this thread:

I do like a good diagram! The Tonnetz fits that description, but just how good is it? That’s what I wanted to work out, and that’s why my posts on that thread were preoccupied with 13th chords. I was trying to find the limits of the Tonnetz. I think the 13th is the limit (the 15th degree is simply a return to the tonic), so any system that works for chords up to the 13th is good enough for me.

Why I’m fine with limits is that there cannot be a perfect system for all types of music. I think I recall that Allan Holdsworth took the approach that if we accept that the octave is a fundamental non-negotiable element of music, the next step is to decide how to deal with intermediate notes. He figured that the 12 semitones was a good place to start for a guitarist, without necessarily being the only game in town. He then considered the many ways that intermediate notes could be selected, and took a binary approach: there are 12 semitones, each of which can be in one of two states (included or excluded from a scale), therefore there are 2 to the power of 12 unique scales. That’s 4,096 scales, ranging from all notes off (a bit of John Cage there, if you know what I mean) to all notes on (Schoenberg perhaps?). Holdsworth added a rule that there could be no continuous sequences of five excluded notes, or something like that. This would eliminate a fair few of the 4,096 options. He apparently tried all the ones that fit his system. This has turned into a major digression, all I really wanted to illustrate is that in music you can do anything, but some things are more useful/common/fundamental/simple than others, and the value of the Tonnetz is primarily related to how strongly it supports these U/C/F/S things. It cannot hope to do everything.

Ah, that’s the other thing I was trying to get at. Even for the 13th there are variations, some more common than others, and there seems to be some difference of opinion in terms of which is the most basic 13th. To start with, I thought that chords based on C, for example, would follow this rule:

Chord	Notes			Thirds
C		C-E-G			major, minor
C7		C-E-G-B			major, minor, major
C9		C-E-G-B-D		major, minor, major, minor
C11		C-E-G-B-D-F		major, minor, major, minor, minor
C13		C-E-G-B-D-F-A	major, minor, major, minor, minor, major

That is, all added notes would remain in the key of C (all naturals). But when I looked at the Tonnetz, zigzagging down and up while moving to the right from C, the sequence is:

Tonnetz C-E-G-B-D-F#-A major, minor, major, minor, major, minor

Almost, but not exactly the same. Why an accidental on the F? Is it just because the zigzagging thirds sequence (major-minor) is a given? So I started checking around. That’s when things got shaky. It turns out that what appears in the Tonnetz is actually a Cmaj13. A C13 is like this, with a flattened 7th:

C13 C-E-G-Bb-D-F#-A major, minor, minor, major, major, minor

But other sources (example Chord Calculator) seem to keep the F natural, so I’m at an impasse. I don’t know enough to decide, and I am not sure it’s that important.

So that’s where I decided to stop the analysis and start drawing pictures! Here’s one I cooked up, with the explanation below.

pythagorean tonnetz
pythagorean tonnetz1814×1814 380 KB

I realised that the pattern of the Tonnetz could extend infinitely in all directions, repeating along all three of its axes, and that it could be rendered as an unbound surface of a torus. I wanted to 3D print one, or at least get someone to make one for me, and began making design decisions, one of which was to keep the scale uniform, so that the lines connecting notes were actually proportional to the number of semitones they represented. That’s why we have 3-4-5 triangles and the ghost of Pythagoras instead of the perhaps prettier isometric layout and the ghost of Buckminster Fuller. Getting the circle of fifths (the horizontal lines in the Tonnetz) on the main (toroidal) axis of the torus will involve a bit of skew because that is made up of the hypotenuse of the triangles, which I have on the diagonal of my design. I resolved the question of whether to show sharps or flats by inventing yet another form of notation. So AB, for example, is intended to stand for A# or Bb, that is, something between A and B. I removed all the extra bits of information like triad names and added instead a line for the chromatic scale which is also present in the Tonnetz, amazingly. This is shown in dotted pink.

This leads to a problem. If I want a single chromatic line to wind around the torus continuously, like a helix, I need to skew the proportions a bit more, and the thing that has to give is the right-angled 3-4-5 triangle. It doesn’t even help to go back to the equilateral triangles, because that would result in a set of many parallel chromatic rings around the torus, not a single winding line. That isn’t wrong, it’s just different to what I had had in mind. So I’ve reached a pausing point, unsure which direction to go in or even whether it is worth continuing at all.

Meanwhile, here is a near-minimal pocket version of the information in the Tonnetz. It could be minimised still further by removing the repetition of notes around the edges, but I didn’t do that, because I wanted to make it obvious that if you want to go further right from a note on the right edge, for example, you just pick up its counterpart on the left edge and go right from there, or vice versa. Same for top and bottom.

pocket pythagorean tonnetz
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So that’s as far as I got with this. I’ll leave it to marinate for a while.

EDIT: Nothing new under the sun, as they say. I should have image-googled ‘tonnetz torus’ before writing all this. Plenty of people have already been down the same road. Actually, I am really glad about this.

114

Emerson Lake and Palmer came up in my YouTube feed this week. Before punk, I quite liked ELP. I’ve realised that most of what I liked of theirs was music the band did not actually write: Jerusalem, Pictures at an Exhibition, Fanfare for the Common Man, etc. On the other hand, I also liked Greg Lake’s ballads: From the Beginning, Still You Turn Me On, The Sage, and Lucky Man. It was a video of this last song that I watched, and I realised how simple a guitar song it is - something you can learn in a few minutes. So that is what I did; one more song for the repertoire.

These days I have a new respect for Greg Lake’s singing. I don’t think I was really aware of its quality back in the early 1970s.

The other notable video that popped up in my feed was this:

I watched it on YouTube and looked for it on the website so I could mark it off as a completed lesson. Before J starts demonstrating his amplifier, the video has an odd impersonal feel to it, not his usual conversational style and there is something unusual about the sound. The odd feel returns right at the end. Key reference point to remember: Mid-range for an amp is probably the 250-4KHz band.

Lately, I’ve been really focused on the five patterns of the major scale, somewhat at the expense of playing songs, but it feels like a good thing to do, and I’m enjoying the process of getting the shapes bedded in so I can play them in thirds without hesitation.

There was a bit of a milestone in ear training too: I managed a score of 100% for all ascending major scale intervals, with fixed note of origin. I’ve now moved to minor scale intervals.

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115

Er, so do I. But I won’t mention it teehee

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116

I fed Copilot my ear training data, requesting a written analysis, keeping the style terse but using complete grammatical sentences. It responded:

Across all sheets, the long‑term trend is upward. The chart confirms that early volatility gives way to sustained high performance. The data shows that your training is effective, your retention is strong, and your ceiling is high.

Of course, it said a lot more, but that is the summary paragraph.

Then I asked it for suggestions. Its response was, again, extensive, but actually quite interesting in terms of addressing particular weak spots. When I finish with the present set, I may try some of its ideas.

117

I’ve been quite focused on playing up and down the five positions of the G major scale, both straight and in thirds. I don’t know about this practice stuff - I don’t seem to be remembering the patterns any better than days ago, and I don’t feel my manual dexterity is improving either. I’m not at the point of giving up and switching my attention to something else, I’m just a bit underwhelmed - and wondering how much of this is really required to see a noticeable improvement.

Another annoyance has been string buzz, most pronounced on the B string, but also present on G, D and A. It occurs on the low frets, particularly the 2nd. I think I may have found the reason; recall that a couple of posts back I complained about cramp in the hand, and surmised that I was gripping and plucking too hard? Well, here’s a closeup of my second fret, where I’m pulling the G string aside:

IMG_20260304_230450670
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You can clearly see an indentation in the fret. It’s not the only one. Considering I’ve only had this guitar 18 months, I’m rather surprised at this amount of wear. It is surely not normal, and given that the guitar is a genuine Fender, I presume it is my playing style that is to blame, not the fret material.

For now I’ve fixed the problem by raising the saddles, but I guess this is going to mess up the intonation, and trigger a cascade of adjustment. I think the long-term fix is to play more gently, and at some stage commit to a fret replacement.

118

Can you recognise a -NGD (negative new gear day)? I actually realise I bought something I don’t need. I discovered that the hum I was getting with my venerable 20th Century cables was due, not so much to their degeneration, but to their proximity to a metal LED lamp base on my desk. Buying a shorter cable solved the hum problem, not because it is a better cable (it probably is) but more because it wasn’t looping around in the vicinity of the lamp. One odd thing I noticed: if I touch the base of the lamp with one hand and the Pocket Master with the other, the hum increases. Should I be worried? The lamp runs on 12V DC.

Anyway, I wonder if anyone else uses a Pocket Master. It has been exceedingly popular, so it wouldn’t surprise me if another of the denizens of this forum has one. I was quite interested to see that Sonicake have now released their souped-up version of this little multi-effects: the Smart Box. There have been umpteen YouTube reviews of it since NAMM. I’ll consider a SB if my PM ever breaks down.

Am I avoiding the subject of my guitar playing? I am, a bit. Nothing much changes, to be honest. I play and practice the same old stuff, and am fairly content to do so. There seems little point in adding new songs or exercises when I clearly need to put in much more work on what I’m already doing. I think I have a more realistic idea of where this is all going - and it is not spectacular virtuosity. Far from it. Clean playing still eludes me. I am calmly wondering whether I’ll ever be able to play as well as I need to to record my own material. I’m quite aware that I’m doing things the hard way, playing a manual instrument as opposed to using MIDI or, heaven forfend, AI, but this is for its own sake - I just want to be able to do it. I don’t need money, respect or advancement out of this. I don’t need anything from anybody in fact, and it is for this reason that I don’t worry about AI or new equipment; I am sure there are many people just like me who are content to learn and play, regardless of the technological alternatives.