Bravo, Matthew, wonderful to hear and see your progress.
I suggest start working on In Bloom. Play what you can, stretch yourself on the rhythm. And maybe the solo is something that you don’t worry about for now. As long as you are comfortable dealing with things that you perhaps discover are just too much stretch and don’t become frustrated then there is nothing wrong with commencing this as a long-term, slow burn project. Just don’t allow it to become all consuming and distract from followig the module lessons, practice, and song playing.
Well done on the playing of Honky Tonk Woman with the app!
April has mostly been a month of consolidation. I looked at Spirit in the Sky on the songs app and that’s got me practicing up and down strumming on my electric guitar to a metronome, moving round a few power chords and attempting to keep in time. It’s getting better.
I’ve also returned to Wonderwall which I started on at maybe the beginning of this year. There’s lots of simplified versions on the web but I was determined to learn something like an authentic strumming pattern for it which was probably quite a big ask only 4 months into learning to play. It took quite a while playing the rhythm with muted strings before I started to get it and then there was the chord sequences to learn. I got so far but decided to pause it (this was maybe 2 months ago). I’ve returned to it this week and am making progress again. I’ve learned the 2 main strumming patterns (and can switch between them) in isolation from any backing track because there’s enough going on for my poor brain to process. Now it’s time to learn to match it to a backing track. This has made me appreciate that it’s actually quite a fast/busy track in terms of what your strumming hand has to do. I’d say at the moment I’m comfortable at maybe 90% speed, can play at full speed but it’s definitely a bit rushed so more practice required. So people can jeer at Wonderwall and roll their eyes, but I won’t be because it’s proving to be a journey!
Hey matt, interesting log. How’s your Wonderwall coming along? I just started Grade 2 last week and I just added this song to my practice, first time to try in will be this afternoon. I’m not too worried about the fact WW seems to be jeered at (I didn’t even realize this was a thing till I started learning guitar, lol.) I finally listened to it on the App today, and thought, “hey, I’ve heard this at least once before”!) It seems to be a nice little song, don’t know what all the fuss is about.
I’ll have to ask over on the Guilty Pleasures, thread: What songs do we secretly like but don’t want anyone to know that we do! Come have a visit.
I’m continuing to practice the various bits of Wonderwall (there’s the verse, pre-chorus and chorus mostly) but I’ve still not put them all together to play through with the song. I think I keep delaying doing that because I know the first play-throughs will be terrible (I know that’s all part of the learning process!!!). I’m off work this coming week and it looks set to rain so maybe I’ll set some time aside to try to see how close I am to being able to play along to the song in Justin’s app and then the original recording. Don’t expect anything uploaded to YouTube just yet haha!
I do suspect that many of the people who jeer at Wonderwall can’t play it and would struggle if you offered them money to attempt it. It’s true that most of the song is covered by a single strumming pattern but it is relatively complex and also reasonably fast. Justin’s songs app has a simplified pattern of 4 downstrums per bar but in reality it’s a pattern of 1/16th notes and pattern of ups, downs and some gaps if you really want to be authentic. I probably should have started with the simplified pattern and expanded once I’d got that nailed.
I also suspect that much of the jeering comes from people not wanting to give credit to a couple of loud-mouths from Manchester for writing such a popular song. I think these days Liam is still fairly unlikeable but Noel (who wrote most Oasis songs) has dropped a lot of the attitude and comes across far better in interviews nowadays
Thanks for asking about my progress and good luck with your WW practice
