Hi and welcome to my practice journal. Here I plan to post videos of what I’m working on and what I struggle with.
I started playing guitar on 15th of September, 2025. And my main goal was to use it as a comp instrument mainly, because at the same time I decided to try to learn how to sing, and while piano is great and all, guitar felt much better and much more intimate instrument for this purpose.
But the more I play it the more I want to dig deeper: blues and fingerstyle caught my fancy, I started to consider to purchase loop pedal, and even - gasp - having thoughts about buying electro guitar. We’ll see how far I’ll go…
So this is my first entry in extremely experimental format - with talking to the camera. Also I tried for the first time record guitar digitally and I messed up levels, so my low E just hammers like crazy… and now I understand how important is muting… oh, well…
Also, I’m not a native speaker, so forgive me for butchering not only music, but also English language.
That was really good. At 6 months in its very impressive what you have achieved. I also really enjoyed what you said afterwards. It was very interesting.
Well done Rem on starting your Learning Log! I suggest you have a look around at other people’s Logs, so that you get more ideas and have a bit of reflection: what/how you would like your LL to be? Will it be structured or more free wheeling? Will it be about Music and Guitar learning only or you’ll like to share more? We have a few LLs here that are proper living rooms where tea is served and we make friends and share about different topics. And if it’ll be structured how often would it be best to update? Oh…you don’t need to find all the answers at once, but rather find them along the way. I’m not native english speaker either, so you’ll have to sometimes bear with my mistakes as well
Tomorrow is going to be nervous day: I’m gonna play and sing I Will Follow You into the Dark song in front of people in a bar.
But instead of practicing this particular song I’m working on Wicked Game.
I learnt fingerstyle arrangement of the song
I have an idea and experimenting on including comp with vocals in it, so the final structure of the song is going be something like Intro → Vocal → Fingerstyle Verse 1 and Chorus 1 → Outro
Hopefully in a week or two I’ll have my first draft of this song.
Well I did it, it was not so great, but at least I didn’t mess up the song completely. Not a bad start for the first time. As soon as I get the video I’ll post it for posterity sake
Friendlier. It’s basically a concert organized for amateur musicians, mostly vocalists. So the audience is very loyal and kind. It doesn’t make it much easier though. I found myself dry mouthed in the middle of the song, and didn’t know how to fix it.
Yeah, love this song. Fingerstyle comes up nicely, vocals - not so great. I think I’ll do the guitar part first - complete arrangement, and then will try to add singing to it.
Excerpt from my practice session on Wicked Game Vocals. I must say I have no idea what I’m doing and even if this song is approachable for me, but ignorance is bliss
Another day, another struggle. Now, I’m trying to combine guitar with vocals. The structure of the song I have in mind is the following: Intro, vocals with strumming, then Verse 1 and Chorus in fingerstyle. Today I’m working only on intro and vocals part.
It’s coming along nicely! I imagine it’s a hard song to sing, never mind singing and playing at the same time. I really like the fingerpicking arrangement. Great job.
That’s really impressive and you’ve only started so recently! I’ve only just started managing some fingerpicking and singing, but only manage very repetitive, simple patterns with no embellishments whatsoever when I also have to sing. And that’s to myself - I doubt I’d breathe in front of a group of musicians.
Today I was working on my tempo, which is in very poor state. Usually when I play this song (Hurt by Cash), I speed it up quite significantly. I start from 95bpm and end up somewhere around 110bpm.
This play I focus solely on tempo, and I even have visual metronome, and STILL I sped it up in the end.
You’re probably being hypercritical. Your performance is very good, with clean switches from picking to strumming and a fine vocal. Any variations in tempo seem fairly minor. Many - most? - singer / guitarists, particularly when playing live, can make subtle changes in tempo that change the nature of different sections of the song. You are doing fine!
Yeah, I’ve got this self-criticism problem - right after I’ve done anything, I can see only bad things, what I did wrong. Because I know how it should be, and I’m not doing it right.
I had the same problem with my piano playing. Everything sounded wrong and bad.
But time is cure as I found out, and when I come back to the same recording after several months, I listen to it, I still hear all my errors and imperfections, but as from the distance. And at this time I usually say to myself: ‘ok, not that bad’
That’s why I need to record myself and leave it be for some time
Continue working on Wicked Game. But I’m doing other songs as well. Two cases of the most interest:
I transposed House of the Rising Sun to Fm key. Now I can sing it quite comfortably in two octaves, but now half of the chords are barre chords. I’m not sure, maybe with time I’ll got my muscles strengthened, but for now I can’t play it for the whole duration - my left hand thumb muscles are screaming with pain. Maybe I’m doing something wrong and press too hard… I’ve got the same problem with Hey there Delilah song with partial barre chords.
I started to train my ear. Got the list of simple songs and working on melody lines. I don’t trust my ear at all, so usually I need sheet music for vocals, just to be sure. I need to fix it.
It’s interesting how hard it is to keep low note, it requires quite a bit of breath control which I lack. So this is the perfect song for training my low range.
We’ll see how far I’ll go…
