My 'ultimate' goal in my guitar playing

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Having watched the lesson on setting your long term goal, I got thinking about what I really wanted long term from my guitar playing. I would love any tips, comments etc on the plan.

Long term goal – Play instrumental covers of songs I love to my own backing track. 50’ 60’s and show tunes
Steps:-
Rhythm guitar

  • Strumming
  • Accurate chords that are needed for the song. Open, Power and Barre

DAW

  •  Backing track

  •             Midi track – instruments

  •             Drum track

  •             Backing vocals – real (with auto tune) or plug in.

  • Enhancing the track – Plug ins etc

Lead Guitar

  •      Individual notes – correct frets and strings – fast scales, rifts

  •      Muting

  •      Bending, whammy bar

  •      Volume, phrasing

Transcribing

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I like your goal. I’ve learned over many efforts that writing down one’s goals is the first and an important step in reaching them. Another important step is to make them as specific as possible. Here’s to reaching your goal!!!

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I agree it’s good to have a plan. It’s also a good idea to have some idea of the process you might go through to tick off each of the items, something you can measure progress against. When it’s quite a big plan it can be easy to think that you’re not getting closer to the end goal if you don’t have some landmarks along the way.

Also keep checking in along the way and ask yourself questions like are you enjoying the process or not. Don’t be welded to your goal if you start to lose the love for it, consider a side road for a while.

I thought that my goal was to learn to play metal guitar, it’s the music I love after all. What I’ve found over the past year is actually prefer playing my acoustic guitar so that’s the path I’m on. I have a few songs that I’m learning and will see what follows. Maybe someday I’ll work my towards playing metal lead guitar but not right now.

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Absolutely an achievable goal. You can get backing tracks for many popular songs from https://www.karaoke-version.com/. Might help you with your goal.

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Thank you @tony , @mattswain and @jkahn . I have printed this goal and steps out so that I can keep ticking off the steps as I fulfil them.

@jkahn thank you. I do use them for my backing tracks at the moment and they will be my ‘master’ when I start to do my own.

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I use https://moises.ai/ now to take the original song and change the mix of the vocals, bass, drums or guitars and slow it down, loop or see the chords or the lyrics. It is amazing.

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Hi @danweeks11 , thank you for that, I will have a look. That sounds interesting.

For the moment using different ways of having a backing track works well for me. It means I can leave making my own until a lot later down the line. It is something I think I want to do later though, just for the interest in how they are made. I can use Reaper at a very basic level.

What I think I will do first, is to take an existing backing track from either moises or the karaoke site and just replace one or two of the individual parts with ones of my own. This will gradually build up my confidence in building the tracks.

This is a way off at the moment though as my first concentration is on improving my rhythm techniques :wink:

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Agreed. It’s one tap to mute an instrument or vocal in a song - instant backing track!

I also use the “smart metronome” feature for tricky rhythms, and the “retune” feature to transpose to better suit my vocal range.

Has become an essential tool in my practice workflow.

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