Nate's Learning Log

[Mustela]

Spent some time with doing index/ring with a mini barre on the ring finger on fret 5 the past couple days and I’ve decided I don’t like it. While I get the big movements down more quickly that way, I’m finding it very difficult not to mute the 5th string, even when I’m trying the “chord perfect” sort of thing just to make sure I’ve got good tone. Doing the changes to a metronome or even attempting faster and faster changes (a la 1 minute change drill) it’s right out. At that point I’m having a difficult time getting any of the strings to ring clearly.

I can get MUCH better tone out of the index/ring/pinky 3 finger method, even though I’m slower with it. I suppose I just have to work harder to pick up speed this way? Working on it today, it seems like if I can put my little finger onto the G string (muting it) when I’m playing the E power chord beforehand, it helps me keep my place more accurately when I slide up from the 2nd to the 5th fret. I still have to focus on stretching my index finger up to the 3rd fret, but the more things I can get out of my conscious thought processes, the better off I am. By the end of my practice session, I was playing more cleanly at 75bpm than I was at 65 bpm the other day, so that’s a good thing. Still have ~10bpm to go.

I spent some time trying to put my index finger down first, but it seems like then trying to stretch my ring/pinky fingers to a good spot at fret 5 is more difficult than leading with those fingers and then stretching with my index.

Success with the smaller challenges is making me feel a bit better about my playing. Trying to find some people at a similar skill level so we can learn and play together and challenge each other in ways that help us improve. So far, there’s 2 of us, but the other guy is a lot busier than I am and lives in the next county over so I’m not sure how that will go with our frequency of getting together. But it’s a start.

[Mustela]

My friends put on another community jam at a local brewpub this past weekend. It was mostly ukuleles, but this time I was NOT the only guitar in attendance. There were 3 of us this time!

My objectives this time were to improve with keeping up on faster tempos and also to use barre chords more.

I did best with using the full F chord. B and Bb probably came in next. Bm, Bbm, and C7 a bit lower in quality.

The big challenge for me was the song White Sandy Beach by Iz. Most of the versions I see shared online use a lot of open chords. But it occurred to me that playing the whole thing with barre chords made more sense.

This one hit me hard because I had a hard go of playing Bb with the double barre in practice with the change to Bbm, so I tried it (in the jam) with using all 4 fingers. That ended up being even more difficult for me. I think this is an example of a spot where I just need to work on the transitions of getting the double barre and then out of it to make the minor shape.

I also found it difficult to do the change from F to C7. The control required for that is something I need to work on.

But overall, I feel like I’ve had some improvement with playing barre chords.

As for the tempo, that was a little more variable. At the start of the whole thing, I was having a tough time. I’m told that was, in part, because the guy leading some of the early songs is not good at leading. I did notice that the entire group (around 60ppl) was all over the place. My sense of rhythm is not strong enough to be able to be steady in that kind of chaos. But I did settle into things and I was able to pick up my tempo and keep up with some fairly fast songs by the end. I was even really feeling the groove for the last 3 or 4 songs and getting into it. Was it demonstrative of much improvement on my end? I don’t know, it’s hard to say. It at least illustrates that I can play a bit faster with some warmup time, at least. But I did also feel on some of those that I was very much near my limits of what my right hand can do.

[Mustela]

Well, I was just informed this week that I’m going to be going to Ireland next year to attend a ukulele festival in Galway for a friend’s birthday. I guess I’ll need to learn or I’m going to be on my own a lot of the time. It’ll be easier to transfer chords I know on guitar over to a baritone uke, though…so maybe I’ll need to pick up one of those at some point so I can start transferring skills. Or maybe I should take a uke my wife doesn’t play much and tune it DGBE. That’d be the cheaper way.

[Mustela]

Was feeling like it was time to start working on lessons for new material so I got back into some Grade 2 lessons in addition to working on some of the songs I’ve been describing above. Got to the module 8 song list and picked one from that to work on. I ended up choosing Every Rose Has Its Thorn. Chords are easy enough and it introduces a 16th note strum. I’ve been working on getting that strum and this is the kind of thing that my Boss Rhythm Partner is amazing for.

So I set it at around 50bpm and started out doing 8th note downstrums, something I’m fairly comfortable with at this point. Then I worked to keep the same tempo but then add the upstrums for consistent 16th note strums in order to get the feel for those relative to the drum beat I was using. I got to feeling pretty good with that.

Today I sat down with the actual strum that Justin mentions being fairly important for the beginning of the song and slowed that one way down until I felt like I was getting it solidly and consistently. I used the tap tempo function on the drum machine to set a starting tempo (ended up being about 40bpm). I spent a good amount of time working to dial in my strumming and to hit correctly on the beats. Once I started feeling comfortable with it, I noticed that I wanted to start speeding up but of course that threw off my strumming with the rhythm. So restarted and really pushed hard to stay consistent at that same tempo for a good amount of time. Once I was able to do that while moving around and looking elsewhere (but still feeling the beat), I bumped the tempo up 10bpm.

That tempo increase felt pretty natural and it didn’t really take me long to dial that one in. I was tossing in G and Cadd9 chord changes here and there just to get a feel for that. I fairly quickly bumped it up another 10bpm so I was working on 60bpm. I picked up on that one fairly well, too. Spent a little time there and I finally pushed it up to 70bpm, which is apparently what the song should be. That one took me some effort. I kept lagging behind the beat and I had to restart several times before I managed to find it and stay there. I did not bother with trying chord changes here. I just wanted to hold that tempo. I kept at it until I started to get tired. Both my fretting fingers from using that stuck 3/4 G and also my strumming arm. I do have some trouble with strumming as the tempo gets up there so this will be good work. I’ll try to work on this again sometime after dinner and get more practice at faster tempos, hopefully getting that strumming arm up to pace.

Thankfully with the chords in this song being pretty straightforward, it’s the strumming I can spend my time focusing on and I can start adding in some of the chord changes so that I can get the progression before I start trying to play along with the recording.

Yesterday I got together with another JG forum member who lives nearby and we did some jamming together. We’re not exactly at the same point, but we’re at a good point where we can play together and work on stuff that we each need to work on. He’s been doing a lot of work with his local instructor on learning scales and soloing, so I did most of the rhythm playing while he worked on his soloing. It was a good time and we’re definitely going to do it again. He’s going to choose the next song we work on. We’ll work on stuff independently for awhile and then get together again to play the song(s). I would like it if we kinda built our own little songbook of stuff we’ve worked on together so that as we do more of these, we have multiple songs we can pull out. This time we only worked on 1 song together. It was cool, though. We ran through a few times trying some different things. One of the versions of the song we played along with was a live recording that had an extended instrumental outro where the band did a bunch of different stuff so we played around with dynamics and getting different tones to “fit” what the recording was doing, essentially by ear. If this goes well between us, maybe I’ll be able to convince him to play an open mic with me.

[Mustela]

Amusingly enough, I was finally convinced to get a baritone uke a couple weeks ago, and now I’m a late registrant for a uke fest (even though I only had in mind doing one in June next year).

From a general music standpoint this particular one (Strathmore Uke Fest in MD) has a lot of really solid classes. Even though baritone uke is VERY much like guitar (especially the one I got, which has steel strings), and on guitar I could probably handle most of the intermediate material, I’m still doing the “Confident Beginner” learning track. There’s plenty of material at that level that I had to make some hard choices.

I’m bringing my guitar along, as well. Not to the uke fest, but it’ll stay in my hotel room. That way I can see about applying some of this uke material to guitar in the evenings before bed.

Sadly I haven’t been able to find comparable guitar events at a comparable price. Most of the guitar events I’ve found focus on a premium experience where you get to meet and take a class from at least one major guitar celebrity. And you definitely pay for it. INCLUDING the cost to board my dogs, my wife and I are spending maybe 1/3 as much as a similar guitar retreat would cost all by itself. Add the dog boarding to that, too, and we’re looking at probably 1/4 the cost.

I’ve found a rare few guitar retreats that are more affordable. One of them even just happened not 20min from my house. It’s still more expensive than this uke fest, but it’s a lot closer to it than it is to the other guitar stuff. Problem was, when I looked to register for it, all the seminars that interested me were full except for a beginner vocals class. I wasn’t going to pay for an entire event so I could do a beginner vocals lesson plus learn flamenco and celtic guitar. Nothing against those styles. They just don’t interest me.

In this uke fest, I get to take the beginner track lessons (2hrs/day for 5 days) plus do the ensemble performance (1hr/day for 5 days with the 5th day being the performance), take a blues seminar, a seminar focused on Beatles songs, and a seminar focused on intros, outros, turnarounds, and such. There were more I wanted to take, but stuff conflicted so I had to make hard choices. Still, I think I’ll be able to bring a lot over to the guitar with minimal fuss. bassline stuff excepted, of course.

Pretty sure my brain will be fried by the end of it because there are group jams just about every day, also.