Ryan's Learning Log and Accountability Program

[theryanbamford]

Greetings!

I started playing guitar this year, on January 12th, 2025. At this point I’ve been playing just over 4 months. I became almost immediately obsessed and play about 3-5 hours a day, probably closer to 8 hours on weekend days. Though it might sound uninspired, my only goal with guitar really is to be better than I was yesterday, every day. I would like to create my own music eventually and learn to sing, but I don’t have an immediate timeline for that. Every day I just strive to be a little bit better than I was yesterday and that keeps me going - not just with guitar, but with everything in life. My 11 year old son also got inspired to pick up the instrument and I’ve been teaching him what I can in his limited attention span and he has also signed up for Justin Guitar and has been following that.

The purpose of this post is more or less to share my journey and keep myself accountable for creating monthly goals, sticking to them, and continuing to record progress videos. I aim to record progress of myself at the end of each month, primarily for my own reflection but also in case anyone wants to follow along on my journey. So, I plan to update this basically every month to follow through on that goal. I’ll start off by sharing a few of the videos I took this past weekend as part of my four month progress, then I’ll share the resources I use, roughly where I’m at, and what my practice routine looks like. Finally I’ll share the big moments in my journey so far and about when they happened based on my personal log.

Video 1: Hell’s Bells (AC/DC) - I’d consider this a “Campfire plus” song that I still have some work to put in, but not sure what kind of campfire I’d play this at.

Video 2: New Slang (The Shins) - This would be considered a “Campfire” song for me, it’s actually one of the songs that inspired me to pick up playing guitar. Even though it only uses four chords, it’s pretty tricky to play because it uses very unique strumming patterns coupled with picked bass notes for every chord.

4 Month Guitar Progress Log - New Slang by The Shins

These are my nearly incomprehensible notes outlining the strumming/picking pattern that I determined from watching one of their live acoustic video performances of it.

Video 3: Thrill is Gone (B.B. King) - This would be considered a “Dreamer” song for me, I have a lot of work to do on it but this is my best attempt that I could reasonably record in a manner that sufficiently sums up where I’m at so far in my journey.

4 Month Guitar Progress Log - Thrill is Gone by B.B. King (big work in progress)

The resources I use are as follows:

• Justin Guitar - currently on Grade 3, module 15. I love Justin’s style of teaching and I think it speaks volumes about his character the way he tried relearning guitar left-handed just to challenge himself and understand what beginners go through. Forgetting what the beginner experience is like seems like a common problem among teachers of any discipline, and they seem to forget little nuances and tips that come naturally to them as professionals now. Justin is the only person I’ve found that has figured this out.
• Yousician - Currently on level 8, working through 3 silver starring the level 9 lessons and gold starring the level 7 lessons. I love Yousician’s method of getting you to play a ton of guitar and I think it’s a fantastic way to learn songs. Think of it like a tablature treadmill that listens to you as you play and tells you if you hit the right notes or not, bend to the right tone, etc. And you can change the speed and loop certain sections of time.
• Scotty West’s Absolutely Understand Guitar Series - I completed this 33-hour long youtube series of uploaded old VHS tapes from 1999 that really helped propel my understanding of music theory early on in my journey

I also have a music stand with a silly 3-ring binder that I put together to track what I’m learning, store song chords / tablature, scale patterns, notes, eBooks, chord shapes, and a personal log of all my small wins. I put a star next to the wins that signify something meaningful but I think it helps a lot to keep track of all the little signs of progress to constantly remind yourself how far you’ve been able to come.

For my gear, I have…

• Yamaha FS800J - Purchased January 12th, 2025, this was a great acoustic guitar to start with at an excellent price point. I’ve since upgraded but I was really happy with this purchase.
• Epiphone Les Paul Traditional Pro IV - Purchased February 12th, 2025. Also really love this instrument, though I would like to try a real gibson some day! Dual humbuckers with coil-splitting is a great way to experiment with tone.
• Ibanez Gio GRGR120EX - Purchased April 2nd, 2025, this is technically my son’s but he seems quite happy with it!
• Fender American Ultra - Purchased May 17th, 2025 - I caught the gear addiction and wanted to try a quality American-made instrument. Very pleased with it so far but still learning how to craft tones I like out of it. It has a HSS pickup configuration with coil splitting on the humbucker.
• Taylor 214ce-SB DLC - Purchased May 17th, 2025 - Wanted to upgrade from my FS800J and am very happy with this guitar. I love how I can plug it in to my amp and explore more tonal varieties and EQ this way.
• Boss Katana Gen3 50W amp - Purchased February 12th, 2025, I love how many effects and tones I can get out of this amp but am still admittedly learning how to use it to its full potential. I love that I can send audio from my computer to the amp via USB, and then loop that audio back to the computer into a DAW along with my guitar’s signal to record covers.
• Spark 2 - Purchased April 2nd, 2025, A bit easier to use than the Boss Katana but in my opinion not as modifiable to make the best tones possible. However, with my son playing, I needed a second amp, and another modeling option with plenty of features was right up my alley. I use the looper feature on a daily basis.

The “skills” I’ve acquired so far, roughly put in a list format, contains the following:

• Understand the major scale (and its expanded modes) in any key in any position on the fretboard, expressed as a series of intervals.
• Understand the pentatonic major and minor scales in any key in any position on the fretboard, expressed as a series of intervals.
• Understand the harmonic minor scales and modes in any key in any position on the fretboard, expressed as a series of intervals. I know this scale isn’t commonly used but for reasons I’ll get into later, I actually quite like how it sounds.
• Can do barre chords without much difficulty.
• Can switch between most chords very quickly, aside from some very particular ones like F#m11(b5). I happen to type at 150WPM and I feel that I have a lot of prior experience moving my fingers very quickly in a coordinated fashion, which I think gave me a head start on the topic of chord switching. Just a theory…
• Able to do most of the speed exercises I practice at around 95bpm 16th notes.
• Exploring arpeggios, played as sweep picking exercises or played over chord changes.
• My song repertoire from memory start-to-end is about 14 songs - these are songs I would be comfortable playing on a whim without needing to warm up or refresh how they’re played.
• I understand the concept of improvising in a key, landing on chord tones and hitting scale notes in a somewhat melodic format over background chord progressions. I work on this every night.
• I understand the CAGED system, what it represents, and how it allows me to find chords in any position on the fretboard.
• I understand triads and can locate many of them, though I have to think a bit rather than simply knowing their location off the top of my head.
• I understand intervals, how different intervals are located from each other. For example, fret 8 on the 6th string is 2 octaves apart from fret 8 on the 1st string, and 1 octave apart from fret 10 on the 4th string - or a perfect 4th (5 semitones) is the same fret one string higher.
• I’ve learned a great deal of blues licks that I like to utilize at times when improvising, though I don’t typically improvise over a blues progression.
• I have a pretty solid understanding of legato techniques but am far from an expert on them.
• I alternate pick quite well and am exploring other picking techniques courtesy of Troy Grady’s “Cracking the Code” series, such as upward pick slanting, economy picking, string skipping, etc.
• When practicing over my own chord progressions, I’m up to improvising over progressions that involved four chords and try to target chord tones on chord changes. I also try to identify the triads while doing this in different positions on the fretboard.

Things I’m missing that I need to work on in the near future…

• I would like to have a complete understanding of the fretboard, in such a way that I can look at a random string and fret and already know what note it is.
• I would like to have a complete understanding of the different types of triads, and where they’re all located.
• I need to get much better at bending - I’ve been finding this takes a LOT of practice and I’m still working on it every day.
• I want to get faster at my max picking speed in playing clean, articulate fast lines. Shred it bro!
• I need to improve my fretting / picking hand coordination at high speeds. I find that when I try to push it past 100bpm 16th notes, my fingers start to flub up and lose coordination with each other. I haven’t fully determined if it’s my picking hand or fretting fingers that fall behind, but I need to solve this mystery.
• I want to improve on soloing speed and technique. I’m working on a few different solos - Paranoid by Black Sabbath, Fade to Black by Metallica, and Hotel California by The Eagles and they are all too difficult for me to do at full speed - probably for quite some time.
• I want to improve my improvisation skills, the notes selections I use, and the feel and timing I use with them.
• I want to explore more genres, such as Funk and Jazz. I currently mainly play rock (classic, alternative, metal), blues, folk and some country.
• I want to improve my “chugging” speed, such as at the end of Metallica’s song “One”, or their song “Fight Fire with Fire”, both of which the rhythm is currently played too fast for me to keep up with.

My practice routine as of May 2025 looks about like this:

• I usually will pick up my guitar twice during the work day for about 30 minutes and play through some of the songs I know by heart
• My night time routine is where I start to practice deliberately -
• 45 Minutes - spent “warming up”, doing various finger stretches, arpeggios and variations on the spider walk that emphasize string skipping, finger independence and speed. I also play the major scale based on the intervals within starting from every different finger on the 6th and 5th string to help hammer in muscle memory. Then I work on some of the various speed picking exercises I’m working on trying to build my speed.
• 30 Minutes - I pick some random keys and start playing various chord progressions through them and experimenting with different types of strumming and patterns. Most recently from Justin’s Grade 3 beginning I experiment with walking bass notes between notes. Other examples is arpeggiating chords with specific string orders and hammer-ons or pull-offs, and moving the chord progressions up the neck via CAGED shapes.
• 1 Hour - once I find a couple of chord progressions I like, I work on trying to improvise over them by looping the progression. During this improvisation period I first focus on hitting the root notes on chord changes and simply walking up and down the scale from that starting position, the same for the chords that follow and in their respective modes. Sometimes I focus on just pentatonic shapes, and sometimes I try to do so diatonically. I also try to do them as harmonic minor modes, because I actually quite like how it sounds. Once I have the notes of the scales and modes down, I try to identify what those notes actually are, and then identify the triads that exist in that position. Then I’ll repeat this process in another position on the fretboard.
• 1-3 Hours - after all of this, I start to work on songs that I’m getting close to nailing. I usually do this in Yousician, but sometimes straight from the tabs and sometimes from Justin’s lessons. Then, I’ll work on getting gold stars on the next Yousician course song. These are expressed as a series of incrementally harder challenges that focus on specific techniques, such as movable barre chords, legato, sliding, bends, etc. Finally, I’ll work on some “Dreamer” songs that are quite outside of my skill level to currently complete at full speed, slowly working up my tempo and technique until I can get closer and closer to my goal.

A timeline of events so far…

1. Month 1:

• Learned most of my open chords, started exploring melodies, learned some basic songs, got my first Acoustic and Electric Guitar

2. Month 2:

• Got Barre Chords down. I practiced these to a drum track, first changing chords on every beat, then every half beat, then quarter beats, then incorporating strumming patterns. I feel fortunate to have been able to do these quickly, though switching to them took some time.
• Started exploring Legato techniques (Yousician teaches this a bit early I feel…)
• Learned C Major scale and Pentatonic scales, though I didn’t understand what these meant yet.
• Learned some more complex songs, such as Californication (along with the solo).
• Learned a lot more about how my amp works and how to get tones I like out of my Les Paul.
• Figured out more about what types of picks I like - settled on the John Petrucci Jazz III.
• Started to understand what the major scale actually meant, understanding the musical number system as well as the intervals in them.
• Started exploring more complex chords, such as Edim7, D#dim7, Bm7.
• Figured out how to super glue my bleeding finger tip calluses (lol).
• Started learning power chords.
• Started experimenting with finger picking.
• Started experimenting with jamming to backing tracks.
• Started learning more complex songs, such as Fade to Black.
• Better at techniques like hammer-ons, slides, and picking without looking at my right hand.
• Figured out that I benefit from and enjoy anchoring my pinky on the pickguard to give me greater control and stability.
• Started to understand modes expanded from the diatonic scale.
• Started exploring chord progressions and understanding how they’re laid out in different keys - how to know when the chord should be a minor or major and where exceptions are made.
• Learned how chords are made of the 1st, 3rd and 5th of a given scale, and how additional chords are generated out of that - such as dominant 7 chords (C7) and Major 7 chords (Dmaj7). Also sus chords, add chords, etc.
• Got both of my guitars setup professionally and then learned how to do it myself.
• Learned how to change my strings.
• Began experimenting with songs in different tunings.
• Learned a lot more full songs, completed Grade 2 of Justin Guitar.
• Got much better at power chords.
• Learned every major scale fingering, as in starting from each finger on any position to play a major scale in any position from muscle memory and interval understanding.
• Learned new techniques for making scales sound musical, such as playing in thirds and four in a line.
• Working on learning how to bend notes.
• Learned new strumming techniques such as “Chick strumming”, backbeat hit, changing on upstrums, etc.
• Noticably better at movable chords like power chords and barre chords.
• Memorized all of Dust in The Wind and could play it well - an important task for me as it was one of my late father’s favorite songs.
• Picky guy at the guitar shop said I improved a lot since I dropped off my Acoustic guitar (I wrote this down in my journal of wins because when I first met him he was totally knocking my picking technique)
• Starting to experiment with loopers and improvising over my own chord progressions, using the techniques I detailed above in my practice methods.
• Started trying to learn the guitar solos in Hotel California and Fade to Black - a seemingly insurmountable task at this point but a huge project to work on that teaches me a lot of new techniques.
• Started learning blues licks and trying to incorporate them in my improvisation.

3. Month 3:

• Made a lot of progress on the Guitar solos I’m working on, but still a lot of work to go.
• Started working on even more difficult songs / solos, such as the full version of Hey Joe as Jimi played it and blues songs like Born Under a Bad Sign.
• Learned more major scale fingerings.
• Noticeably better at holding the pick and not losing grip / letting it spin around in my fingers.
• Noticeable progress on techniques like bending, but still a lot of work to go.
• Learned more full songs of a higher difficulty, such as Enter Sandman and One.
• Noticeably faster picking and fretting speed.
• Improving my rhythm with various songs and solos.
• Started to improvise over more complex chord progressions with more chords, started targeting root notes, 3rds and 5ths.
• Started learning more advanced picking techniques like escape picking.
• Started to learn about triads and identify them and their inversions.
• Started practicing “shredding” speed exercises.
• Learned about the CAGED system and how it helps identify triads and chords all over the fret board.
• Practicing chord progressions and improvisations over new scales such as the harmonic minor modes and blues shuffle riffs.
• Getting noticeably better at improvising in different keys, still a lot of work to go.
• Got my newest guitars!

4. Month 4 Goals:

• My goals for this month include getting better at transcription, learning by ear, improvising both melodies and chord progressions, and continuing to learn songs that test my skills.
• Songs I want to learn are Layla - Eric Clapton (the acoustic version), Kryptonite - 3 Doors Down, Sharp Dressed Man - ZZ Top (just the rhythm for now), This Love - Maroon 5, and Paranoid - Black Sabbath (including the solo). I’m relatively close on most of these so I think it should be doable in the next couple of weeks.
• I’m also working on a few Iron Maiden songs but they are WAY beyond my current skill level and it’s really just to expose to what classic metal is played like.
• I also want to learn “I will follow you into the Dark” by Death Cab for Cutie - but I’m taking this as an extra challenge because I’m trying to learn how to play it by ear and transcribe it as per the latest Justin Guitar lesson in Grade 3 Module 14. Props to UltraLord in the JG community for recommending Soundslice - a good tool that can be used to create tablature and loop certain parts of songs.
  
  

5. Month 5 Goals:

• By the time of my 6 month anniversary I want to try and record myself playing both the rhythm and lead portion of Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits and combine both into one video. This is a real challenge but I’m already starting to work on it and it’s coming along fairly well. I can do both of the main solos almost fully in-time but the rhythm portion is actually proving a fair bit more challenging, something about holding barre chords for 6 minutes straight is proving difficult.

• To be continued…

I think that about sums it up. To finish off this post, here’s the current progress videos I’ve made so far:

1 Month - Maggie - Colin Haye - this is another one of those songs that inspired me to pick up guitar. Just running through a couple of the chord progressions in this song. Not much to see here.

1 Month Guitar Progress Log - Maggie - Colin Haye (Feb 2025)

2 Month - California Dreamin’ - I actually posted this video in the Beginner’s Safe Space thread.

2 Month Guitar Progress Log - California Dreamin' - Barre chord practice

10 Weeks - Dust in The Wind - I had a lot of fun learning this song, still made plenty of mistakes here but we took a trip to the mountains and I just had to get a video while I had the opportunity.

10 Weeks - Wish You Were Here- Learned this one from Justin’s course, it’s one of my “Campfire” songs now and a lot of fun to play.

3 Months - Hotel California Solo - I have a LOT of work still to do on this but this was where I was at at 3 months.

4 Months - Improvising in the key of A# Major - Figured I’d also record my progress with improvising. I was mainly focused on the pentatonic scale in this video and the chord progression abrubtly ends because I didn’t think to add a fade out or ending to my progression loop. Something to remember in the future.

4 Month Guitar Progress Log - Improvisation in the key of A# Major

4 Months - Skinny Love - Bon Iver - This song uses a really unique tuning of C G E G C C tuned to around 435Hz. The 1st and second string being tuned to the same frequency creates a very haunting harmonic tone to every strum and it’s a lot of fun to play.

4 Month Guitar Progress Log - Skinny Love by Bon Iver

4 Months - Sweater Weather - The Neighborhood - Not much to see here, just another campfire song. I figured I would start to also record songs I can actually play well, rather than just the ones I’m currently “Working on”, so I will continue to do this in the future.

Thanks to anyone who cares to read all this, but even if you didn’t, thanks for being here!

[jowijunk]

That is way far out! Great job! Hard to believe you learned all that in 4 months but you have put in the work and it shows. Well documented journey! No clue how you find the time but hats off to you and a wonderful and enspiring journey. You make me want to clock out of work and go play! Haha! Thanks for the inspiration and rock on bro! Oh, and somehow you obviously find time to work out! You budget time very well, also inspiring!

[theryanbamford]

Thanks man! The kids are about ready for bed around 8:30pm, I’ll play with my older son a bit but from that point I basically play until 12:30am (hence why all my videos are recorded around midnight lol). To be honest, I’m kind of sacrificing sleep a bit but it is what it is, once I get going it’s hard for me to stop. As for the gym, I actually spend no more than 40 minutes 5 days a week there, since I go on my lunch break at work. However, they are an incredibly brutal 40 minutes and I’ve been doing it nonstop for close to 6 years now. Bodybuilding (if you can call it that) taught me the value of consistency and dedication and I think that serves guitar quite well

[Ontime]

@theryanbamford

Shred it bro!

Man I totally dig it.

This is the way to take it head on. Straight up, and solid. Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to future update

[Prof_Thunder]

That is totally outstanding dedication to a new pastime and I’m really impressed with your progress, not just the playing and videos but all the dedication to learning theory. I can’t imagine how it’s possible to practice so much every day. I would love to have time to do that but by the time I start practicing in the evening I often start falling asleep . Which is probably why after 2 years I’m still on grade 2.

Thanks so much for the post as it was a fascinating read. Keep up the great work. I didn’t watch all the videos yet but I totally loved the AC/DC one that you posted first.

Best, Ian

[Richard_close2u]

Hi Ryan - there are no words to express how stellar your commitment and progress is. Wow.
I have just commented on your Hells Bells video in the performance area and mentioned picking direction of the main riff.
This would be my suggestion if you do not use all down picks.

Keep up the great work. Cheers. Richard | JustinGuitar Approved Teacher https://www.justinguitar.com/teachers/richard-coles

[theryanbamford]

Thanks Richard! I appreciate the suggestion, makes a lot of sense to me. A lot of the alternate picking stuff I tend to do without thinking much about it but there’s definitely room for improvement in efficiency and technique. Where can I see your comment in that area? I saw the video got posted there but didn’t see a place to see comments, though I just clicked it and saw it opens in a mini player with a couple of comments and didn’t see yours.

[Richard_close2u]

Hi Ryan. You’re welcome
Comments don’t appear immediately… hopefully not too long a delay.

[theryanbamford]

Richard, your comment did end up loading. I really appreciate the feedback, thank you!

This is my 4 month update - we were out of town two weekends ago so I couldn’t record any videos until this past weekend, so these are where I’m at at 5 months.

My biggest takeaway from this month is learning that while you can learn what other guitarists have done by studying their techniques and how they use the instrument, it’s a bit of a dead end trying to copy their style exactly. Everything from their dynamics to phrasing is a unique part of their style. I think I’m learning that a key part of progressing beyond being a beginner and beyond is finding your own style and flavor - what unique things you can bring to the table. I plan on exploring this further and paying close attention to these things. Another new thing I’ve done is start making songs almost every day, if you can call them that. I let my son keep the Spark 2 amp in his room so I lost my looper, and instead I started recording chord progressions in different keys each day in Garageband on my computer. Essentially I come up with a different chord progression (almost) every day in a random key, and then improvise over it. I figured it would help to track my progress by also recording the improvisation in a separate track, and then exporting it to an aac file to review later. I usually do the song in three sections, for no reason other than easier review and understanding mentally. The first section is just the chord progression (or two) by itself, then I do another loop of the entire progression with a melody I construct over it, typically using chord tones from triads of the backing chord and linking the triads together with scale tones. The final section/loop is purely improvisational and I use that section to explore new techniques I’ve learned and how they can fit into the chords, such as 2 string arpeggios as described by Justin in his fingerpicking video on Mark Knopfler’s style.

Here is an example from today, I messed up quite a bit on the arpeggios at the end but I’m still working on that technique. The chord progression is G minor > C minor > B flat major > D7. So, in the final arpeggio loop of D7 I tried to land on the dominant 7th before repeating it. I think that sounds about right.

One of my big goals for this month is to figure out how to find my own “flavor” or style and explore that with these melodies / improvisations. Coming up with the chord progression itself is a fun act of self-expression, because it’s not just about the chords being used but also the “strumming pattern” or rhythmic pulse of how you play those chords, as well as how long you hold each one for. The melody more or less surfs with the chord progression, while the improvisation allows me to express myself further.

Month 4 Accomplishments

• I was able to learn a few of the songs I tried for in my goals, and a couple extras. I learned Layla (unplugged) by Eric Clapton and successfully managed to transcribe and learn I’ll Follow You Into the Dark. I think I wound up being able to play the latter pretty well, but Layla is going to take some work to get the phrasing more exact on the second solo. Paranoid by Black Sabbath is pretty easy and I can do the solo fairly well, but I’m not 100% there on it.

• Gold starred all of level 7 in Yousician - this means hitting every note on every song in the level 7 course. This was a pretty big accomplishment because Yousician only goes up to level 10, and someone on Facebook at one point told me it would probably take me a year or two to accomplish that, from the point of gold starring level 6 - and the general consensus from other commenters was that this was a reasonable time estimate.

• On Justin Guitar Grade 3 Module 15 now, I’ve slowed down a bit on JG’s material because a lot of the new topics are more advanced and seem to take a bit longer to study - as expected. Stuff like learning to figure out melodies by ear and flexing time are things that I feel benefit a lot from deeper study, while stuff like rolling fingerpicked chords was something I could grasp pretty quickly.

• Currently hold some pretty good records on the leaderboards in Yousician. While I don’t look at guitar as any sort of competition (with anyone but myself yesterday), it’s fun to see your scores improve and get better over time. It gives you a good drive to try harder and excel. Some of these include #1 out of everyone my level for “Oh Me” by Nirvana, #4 for 1979 by Smashing Pumpkins, #1 on an indonesian fingerpicked folk song “Waktu Yang Salah” by Fiersa Besari, #1 on “Plug in Baby” by Muse, #5 on “Hey Joe” by Jimi Hendrix, and #44 on Hotel California, which isn’t as impressive but considering the popularity and difficulty of the song I’m pretty proud of it.

• Expanding upon what I learned about the location of major chords with the CAGED system, I learned how all of those can be modified to make minor and 7 chords, expanding my repertoire of chords by quite a bit.

• On the topic of 7 chords, I learned how they can be used in chord progressions to create greater feelings of tension and resolve. For example, in a I > IV > V chord progression with a V7 chord, more tension is created because the dominant 7th note in the V7 chord resolves to the third of the I chord in addition to the 3rd of the V chord resolving up to the root of the I chord. Quite a bit to wrap your head around but recognizing this stuff is an important step I feel. I also found that V chords in a given key tend to resolve quite well to I chords for looping progressions.

• I recorded 10 “songs” using melody construction, improvisation and chord progressions as I detailed in my summary. Some are longer than others. None are probably worth listening to, just to track my progress.
  

  

• Was able to learn 4 songs by ear in Justin’s Grade 3 Module 14 lesson on transcribing songs for beginners, Polly, Go With the Flow, Blizkrieg Bop, and Molly’s Lips. I expanded that further by transcribing “I’ll Follow You Into the Dark” by Death Cab for Cutie - though I did have to take a couple peeks at tabs to fill in a couple blanks I still felt pretty good about it.

• Got a lot better at fingerpicking stuff, starting to really enjoy that.

• Learned a good number of songs, and working on quite a few others.

• Started experimenting with Neural DSP to get really good sounding tones, feeding it a dry signal from my Katana and using that as an interface was also another learning experience. It’s great to record stuff with Neural DSP plugins in GarageBand, because not only do they sound amazing, you can also change the tones after recording if you want to tweak things a bit.

• Able to play through “Battery” by Metallica at 85% speed now, it’s way too fast to play at full speed but it has been a great speed exercise and lesson in palm muting.

• Learned the entire rhythm portion of Sultans of Swing, which was quite a bit more difficult than I initially expected. The strumming is quite fun and uses a lot of that percussive hit stuff Justin talked about towards the end of Grade 2, and I’ve gotten quite good at that technique as a result. For the first week or so of practice I couldn’t finish the whole song because my hand would start cramping up from holding and sliding barre chords for so long. I’d wake up in the morning with tight and sore hands, at first so sore I couldn’t even close my hand. However, I’m happy to say that I can play through it all the way now, even though it gets pretty tight towards the end. It’s getting better. I’m working on the lead portion as well but that’s quite tricky to do finger picked, it’s totally different than fingerpicking on acoustic.

• Recorded my first video with two parts recorded together - I played the rhythm portion of the solo in Californication and then played the solo on top of it using Garageband. I recorded both parts on video and stacked them on top of each other and it was a great learning experience. I then analyzed what notes were played over which chords and found that it uses all notes from the F# minor scale, and chords from it as well. I plan on doing this with Sultans of Swing as well, though it’s a much bigger project.

• I’ve been playing over backing tracks on YouTube every night for a bit, it’s a lot of fun and I’m trying to learn to break out of the pentatonic box. Usually over my own chord progressions I know the chords well enough that I use the diatonic scale, but I’m working on expanding beyond that with backing tracks.

• Finally able to play through Hey Joe by Jimi Hendrix, though with a reasonable amount of mistakes. The level 10 version in Yousician follows the tabs pretty close and if you’ve looked at how he actually plays that song he’s flying all over the fretboard up and down, embellishing chords in random orders, throwing crazy licks between chords, etc. It’s a lot of fun and it was a meaningful development for me because when I first tried playing through this song I could only do it at 35% speed and even that was a struggle.

• I made more progress on identifying triads of different inversions in different places on the neck, though they still take enough thinking to figure out that I can’t really say I can clearly improvise with them on the fly without a few minutes of study first.

• Able to play all the way through a couple of Iron Maiden songs, just the rhythm portion. Started working on a couple of the solos and able to play them fairly well on their own but cannot keep up with the tempo during the full song though.

• I memorized all of the pentatonic “shapes”, and how they fit together and can move between them easily while improvising now. However, I mainly only know licks that exist in one or two positions, so I want to learn licks in other positions.

• I found that by memorizing three specific fingerings of the major scale and its intervals, you can have complete coverage of the fretboard. I use this knowledge when improvising. For example, if you learn the major scale fingering where the root is under your pinky on the 6th string, you have a 5 fret area covered. If you move your whole hand up two frets, and know the major scale fingering that starts under your index finger on the 6th string, you now have 8 frets covered. If you also memorize the major scale fingering that starts under your pinky on the 5th string, you now have 12 frets covered - the entire octave. Since this pattern repeats on after 12 notes, you essentially have full fretboard covering. This was an eye-opening revelation to me. Now I want to explore triads from each of these positions - since I typically identify them from the position that starts under the pinky on the 6th string.
  

  

Goals for month 5

• I’m working on a few tough songs - Sultans of Swing, Carry on Wayward Son, and Crazy on you by Heart. I’m making quite a bit of progress on all 3 and would like to continue to do so. Carry on Wayward Son is meaningful to me because it was one of my late father’s favorite songs. We’re going on a cruise in November to Mexico and I bought a Donner Hush X-Pro travel electric guitar just for the cruise. I’d like to play it on my balcony on the cruise (with headphones of course), because when we were kids my father would take us on a cruise every year. Every year without fail he’d start blaring this song in our cabin when we first arrived and I’d like to continue the tradition.
• I want to continue making progress on improvisation, speed exercises, and melody creation. I want to learn how to use new techniques with my improvisation, such as sweep picking and arpeggios.
• I want to spend time focusing on and finding my own “voice” with the guitar, and how I can make my sound unique to me. The reason I started guitar in the first place was because I wanted a creative outlet, and I want to learn how to express myself as best I can with the instrument.
• I want to keep working on backing track improvisation and breaking out of the pentatonic box. To this end I also want to internalize more blues licks. I’ve learned quite a few but when it comes time to improvise I can only conjure up several before losing memory of the rest again, and how they can fit into the backing track progression.
• I want to focus more on the chords behind solos in the songs I learn. Studying them in this way like I did with Californication is a great learning experience and really enjoyable.
• For my 6 month video I want one of them to be a combination video of me playing the rhythm and lead for Sultans of Swing. I have the rhythm portion down well but the lead portion is going to be quite the challenge and will take a lot of time. It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve worked on so far.

As for the progress videos for this month;

I’ll Follow You Into the Dark - Death Cab for Cutie
This is the song I transcribed. Typically it’s played with a capo on the 5th fret, but to me it’s a sad song and I quite like how it sounds with the key shifted down a whole step. Plus, I have a deep voice, and if I ever decide to man up and learn how to sing this would match my voice better. I feel pretty good about how I was able to tackle this one.

I'll Follow You Into the Dark - Death Cab for Cutie (5 month guitar progress log)

1979 - Smashing Pumpkins
I really like this song a lot and it was a lot of fun to learn, not very difficult and you get to move up and down the neck a lot.

1979 - Smashing Pumpkins (5 month guitar progress log)

Born Under a Bad Sign - Cream
I have quite a bit of work to do on this song but I’m happy about the progress I made. I would consider this one of my “campfire plus” songs, because I still have a good bit of work to do but individually I can play each part well. Playing through the whole thing without mistakes is a bit beyond my reach at the moment.

Ghost Towns - Radical Face
I really really love this song. It’s one of the songs that I always dreamed of playing when I heard it. The lyrics mean a lot to me for reasons that led me to learning guitar in the first place. I was thrilled to find that the artist (Ben Cooper) actually uploaded a tutorial video on how to play this song to Youtube, so I used his video to learn it. There’s a couple things I change about it, such as the embellishments on the Am chord leading up to the chorus, and I guess it’s a small example of trying to find my own voice.

Ghost Towns - Radical Face (5 month guitar progress log)

Layla (Unplugged) - Eric Clapton
Still quite a bit of work to do on this song as well. I hate to blame the guitar but something about the Taylor didn’t feel quite right and I measured the action and to my surprise the action is measure at about 3.1mm on the 12th fret on the low E string, and Taylor’s specs apparently recommend about 1.5-1.7mm. It’s tough to switch between 3 verses / choruses of barre chords straight into an acoustic guitar solo but I still feel pretty decent about where I’m at with it so far. I’d like to turn it into a campfire song once I have the phrasing better on the solo. I’m getting the Taylor set up tomorrow, because apparently this is done with shims in the neck and I don’t really want to disassemble it myself.

Layla (unplugged) - Eric Clapton (5 month guitar progress log)

And finally here’s the combination video I did of the Californication Rhythm and Lead portions, not much to say that I haven’t already.

4 Month Guitar Progress Log - Californication Duo - Rhythm and Solo

[theryanbamford]

Month 5 Progress Log

Month 5 was a pretty significant month of progress for my playing in general, but perhaps not as much representable by a laundry list of guitar-specific items and new concepts. Now that I’ve been playing for half a year it’s a good time to reflect on where I came from and where I’m going. If I look back on what initially inspired me to start playing guitar, it was to develop a creative outlet and eventually create music one day. In the beginning of last month (June), I started tracking my progress with improvisation both with coming up with chord progressions and improvising melodies / lead lines over it. I continued to do this but in the journey of doing so I sought out how to come up with better and better recordings.

To this end, the primary outcome of last month wasn’t necessarily learning any new particularly challenging songs or techniques, it was on music production itself. I upgraded from GarageBand to Logic Pro and took on the massive learning curve it presented. I’ve been exploring different genres, trying to learn as much as I can about music creation and mixing along the way. Some new techniques I picked up include:

• Double tracking rhythm guitar, panning them for stereo walls of sound.
• Unconventional chord progressions, such as those used in metal genres - also exploring new tunings for recording like a drop D song I did with palm-muted chugging for the riffs.
• Song arrangement itself - Intro, Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Chorus, Outro, etc, as well as project time and key signatures.
• Learned and start to create my own drum tracks for the songs with Logic pro’s drum kit designer, creating drum beats and lines with real drum sounds to fit the time and tempo of the project.
• Explored layering multiple lead guitars for specific parts.
• Starting to understand how to tell a “story” with the songs, starting from a slow introduction with tension, resolution, and climatic moments.
• Learned how to create MIDI bass lines with my guitar… by recording a guitar track played as if it was a bass, analyzing the flex pitch, exporting the flex pitch track to a MIDI region, assigning bass notes to represent the MIDI as a bass guitar.
• Learned a lot about mixing, but have quite a ways to go. For example leaving room in the bass for bass guitar, using lead melodies in the treble frequencies, volume leveling, etc.
• Exploring summing stacks and mixing busses, to EQ or add effects to for example all rhythm guitars, or all lead guitars, or the entire track as a whole.
• Learned that sometimes the lead guitar is just another instrument, not some guitar-soloing device that’s supposed to shine above all other instruments in a mix. It can be used very effectively to create ambience and melody in a way that’s not loud and in your face.
• Learned about using automation controls to level out dramatic swells in volume that can clip the mixer, or bringing up sections that are too quiet - based on where they are in the music rather than entire tracks as a whole.
• Learned a lot about plugin utilization, amp modeling, currently using ToneHub or Logic Pro’s built-in amp models. It’s been my experience that these perform better on recordings than recording a wet feed straight from my amp.

I still have quite a ways to go until I have anything worth sharing with an audience but comparing it to where I started is pretty drastic.

The most recent three examples demonstrate that pretty well.
The first one, I’m not sure what genre to consider it. It has kind of a surfy-vibe and is more mellow, but I sought to explore musical harmony through laid back lead lines. The second is my most recent and was my attempt at exploring an industrial, post-punk kind of genre. The third is a bit hard-rock, with some metal tones and harder bite.

For records’s sake, this is my first recording from June 5th. I would say it’s objectively terrible in comparison, and I still have quite a ways to go with these most recent recordings, but it’s a learning process like the rest of this.

As for guitar-specific progress…

• I mostly accomplished my somewhat crazy idea to try and learn both the lead and rhythm portions of Sultans of Swing and play them concurrently over the record. I’ll link the video below. I posted it in the AVOP community forum as well. I used logic pro to split out the stems from the original song, removing the guitar and leaving the bass, drums and vocals, then I recorded my rhythm guitar and played lead over it. I combined both into one video and it was quite the project.
• I learned a really helpful way to identify triads anywhere on the neck, using what I know about CAGED and which notes in each chord are represented as the root, third (or minor third), and fifth of the chord. It has been invaluable in quickly improvising over backing tracks and recordings, and it has helped make my improvisations sound much better and musical.
• I purchased Guitar Pro through Justin Guitar’s affiliate link, and have been using that to learn tabs, loop sections, slow them down, etc. It’s much better than Ultimate Guitar and I can see myself continuing to use that as a tool moving forward.
• I posted a query to the general discussion on Justin Guitar’s community asking about a certain technique with guitar. Turns out it’s called something like “Rhythm licks”, or “Lead fills”, or anything in between. Basically each chord shape has an associated pentatonic scale that can be played in various licks creatively to connect chords with each other. Jimi Hendrix does it a lot and as far as I’m concerned he was the pioneer of it. All of my “noodling” time has been basically replaced with running through barre chord progressions and finding ways to link them together in this manner, such as hybrid picking 6ths between chords or using hammer-ons with double-stops, etc. This is pretty big because this is the sound I always wanted to achieve with guitar and it’s going to take a good bit of practice but I’m making headway there.
• Following up on that last point, I’ve made a lot of progress in finding my own unique style on guitar and have been working on how to incorporate that into my covers and playing. I’m not sure how I’d describe it, but I’m getting there. Justin talks about this a bit in Grade 3 Module 17 - Finding the Musician In You. It takes a certain level of experience and instrumental know-how before you can start to really figure out how to express yourself freely on the instrument. I’ve always felt that way but one of the wonderful things about guitar is that the more you learn the more free you can get.

The videos this month are more limited because I spent less time learning covers and more time learning music production. Also, the Sultans of Swing video took longer than 3-4 normal videos would have taken, so it felt a suitable replacement.

Sultans of Swing - Dire Straits
This was the hardest video / song I’ve done, the rhythm portion alone is basically barre chords the entire song, and my hand couldn’t handle even the first couple minutes at first. By the time you get the end of the song during the second solo and you’re constantly sliding Bb > C barre chords I almost have to shut off feeling to my hands and just keep letting muscle memory doing the work. The lead was quite difficult to cover exactly but I did my best. Like I said before, I split out the stems in Logic pro, leaving just the drums, vocals and bass. Then I recorded my rhythm on top of it all, and recorded the lead last on top of everything else.

Blackbird - The Beatles
This was a really fun and easy song to learn for me. A couple other songs I’ve learned use this same time of fingerpicked / strumming technique so it wasn’t totally new to me.

I’ll Follow You Into the Dark - Death Cab for Cutie
I redid this one with better technique in the right key and it came out a lot better. I got my Taylor 214ce professionally set up by a luthier and it made a huge different in capability to do barre chords further up the neck. The action at the 12th fret was lowered by about 33%. I tried to set it up myself but couldn’t do it without getting horrible pinging fret buzz in the first few frets. It turns out the frets needed to be leveled, as it’s a used instrument and seemed to lead quite the busy life with its previous owner.

Okay, that’s about it for this month. Looking forward to seeing where I end up at year’s end. I purchased a Scarlett 2i2 Gen4 as an audio interface for recording, and a couple of Audio Technica condenser microphones for recording acoustic guitar. Previously my only way to get acoustic guitar recordings into logic pro was either my phone camera or a direct line from the pickups on the guitar, neither of which are really suitable for good sounding recordings. I’m excited to try them out moving forward.

[theryanbamford]

Month 6/7 Progress Log

I technically started on January 12th, so while I write this I’m on my 7th month. So for the most part, these notes cover the 6th month, but a couple of the videos and things I cover here are from the past 10 days so I decided to kind of combine these moving forward in the monthly updates. This month was another month of solid progress, with a couple of notable breakthroughs. To start with, the biggest thing that really sticks out to me is that I don’t really feel like a beginner any more. In a timeline sense I would still consider myself one, since I only started this year. I think it’s a combination of the fretboard knowledge I’ve gained recently and the fact that I now feel like I can pick up a guitar and noodle around in a way that actually sounds good, without having to play music written by someone else.

There’s still an infinite well of knowledge to learn about playing guitar, so the journey will never end - and that’s exciting to think about.

Main progress notes:

• This month I finally seem to have gained some sense of “fretboard freedom”. Though a combination of CAGED, understanding different major scale positions, how they connect to each other, and being able to visualize the space between the positions, I feel like I can play up and down the fretboard. I’m able to visualize where chord shapes fit in with the major scale positions a lot better. I still have progress I want to make on this but this was a huge eye opener for me once I pieced it together, being able to improvise on the entire fretboard. One of the progress videos for this month is an example of that.

• I’ve started to recognize and work on aspects of my playing that aren’t immediately apparent when learning songs by note, stuff like dynamics and timbre. As a beginner it can be hard to focus on this stuff if you’re too concerned with learning notes, and how your hands work, and now that I have a better grasp on that, I’m able to focus on these more intangible qualities. For an example, when playing through Dust in the Wind now, I focus on letting the notes ring out to each other, so the whole song flows in a blended manner that sounds more cohesive, like someone speaking fluently in a language rather than blurting out individual words in a more jarring manner. I hope that makes sense somehow.

• In Yousician I’m about halfway through the level 9 learning path courses. I still try to make sure I get 3 silver stars on a song before moving on. I’m working on gold starring (hitting all the notes without mistakes) level 8, and only have a few songs left to go for that. The level 9 modules I’m on now are about fretboard coverage and “chord riffs” they call it, so that’s a fitting spot for what I’ve been trying to work on.

• I just started Justin Guitar - Grade 3, Module 19. Some of the lessons I’ve gotten into so far have required a bit more time to spend on them, such as transcribing open chords and open tuning experimentation, so to fit that into my schedule and properly absorb it I’ve slowed the pace down from the speed I was initially going through the modules.

• I’ve been getting better at playing fast riffs, and trying to learn songs that have them. One of the videos from this month is one such example, but I’m also working on a couple of Megadeth songs that were at one point too fast to keep up with. I can keep up with it now, and the endurance is there, but some parts are still too tricky to claim I can play the song all the way through.

• I’ve made a ton of progress on improvisation, mostly from the aforementioned fretboard knowledge I’ve recently pieced together. I’m able to hit chord tones much more effectively and link between them in ways that sound much more musical than before. I can recognize chord tones a lot quicker without thinking much, for a rough example; I know a C major triad is C E G, and a C major barre chord on the 6th string is on the 8th fret, so I know the 8th fret on both the 1st and 6th string is a C, I know a C power chord is made of the 1st and 5th, therefor I know that the 10th fret on the 5th string is a G, and I know an octave is two strings up and two frets from the root, so I know the 4th string 10th fret is C, and I know the root position triad from this shape starting from the 4th to the 2nd fret is C E G, and I know the shape of it, that covers every chord tone in that position. This can be expanded across the entire fretboard.

• I’m faster and cleaner at every speed and technical exercise I’ve been working on. I did actually have to switch up my picking technique a bit, and bend my pick in the other direction, where it’s angled down towards the neck instead of away from it, if that makes sense. It’s taking a little bit of getting used to but not too bad. It was worth it.

• I was able to take Justin’s lesson on Thumb & Finger Strums from Grade 3 Module 17, took his advice and used it to try and play through songs that aren’t necessarily played that way with time signatures that fit, and was able to successfully do an original cover of a song I’ll post in the video section of this update.

• I’ve gained a ton of knowledge on music production, mixing, mastering, etc - but still have a long way to go. For example I’m working on a full cover of the song “Japan” by Yot Club, which kind of has a post-punk vibe. The cover is every single instrument from the drum track to the synthesizers. I read that one of the best ways to learn more about production is to try to recreate a song you enjoy from scratch so that’s what I’m trying to do. The synthesizer bit is quite tricky - while I could sit there for hours on end trying to figure out how the heck synthesizers work, I only have a vague idea and no clue how to find the exact tone I’m looking for. Since I already have a good bit of experience tone crafting with guitar, I’m using my guitar double tracked with tons of effects like ring shifting, tremolo, phasers, flanger, timing, EQ, etc. and emulating the synthesizer sound with guitar. I don’t even know where to begin explaining all of this one yet.

• I’ve improved my scores on basically everything in Yousician - a meaningless metric aside from being able to see progress on paper with numbers.

• I’ve made progress on all the songs I’m working on. Under the Bridge by RHCP, Fade to Black by Metallica (the ending solo is my roadblock), and Peace Sells by Megadeth (rhythm only)

• I’ve gotten more effective at finding tones that I want to use in different situations, with ToneHub, plugins in my DAW, and my Boss Katana Amp.

• My endurance has improved with tough pieces. Peace Sells by Megadeth is a good example. The second half of the song is a really fast riff that constantly repeats and can cramp your hand up if you’re not careful. Another one is A Forest by the Cure - not really a difficult song, but the quick down picking for the entire song requires some good form and muscle involvement to make it through.

• I’m a lot faster at identifying triads all over the neck, I made a connection between the CAGED system and where triads fit into that and it made a huge different. While this does fulfill one of my major goals from the previous couple of months, I found a bit of a weakness with relying too much on this for improvisation, where it can make the solo feel a bit rehearsed or repetitive. I’ll describe that in the video section.

• I got studio monitor speakers, which make a world of a difference when mixing and mastering. Before I could only really hear audio from my interface with headphones plugged in, and while I have an amazing pair of headphones I love (Sennheiser HD 660s2), it shuts me off from the outside world and has some drawbacks when trying to balance audio for more circumstances.

• I’ve gotten better at creating drum beats for songs. Rather than relying on the session player in Logic Pro, I’ve been putting the drum beats together myself with pattern regions, customizing the sounds of each “note” on the pattern, mixing and mastering it, etc.

• I got a webcam for recording, which makes a huge difference in ease of video creation and syncing videos with audio. Before this I was propping my phone up, trying to trim the video from my phone, sending it to my computer, and then syncing the audio which was recorded separately. This was much more time consuming and cumbersome.

• I’m still experimenting with rhythm fills when playing lead, and figured out thanks to Justin that in order for it to sound good the fills still need to fit in with the rhythm of the song. It sounds pretty obvious but before hand I was just throwing fills in that sounded cool without considering how it threw off the rest of the track, which makes sense because when I created a song this way in Logic Pro I had a hell of a time trying to get the bass and drum parts to actually cooperate with my lead / rhythm playing.

• I’m getting a better understanding of phrasing, note choices, and how to be more mindful with my playing.

• This is a doozy but I started trying to learn how to sing… quite poorly. But, I am making progress. Yousician also has a really neat singing version of their app that allows you to see your pitch as you sing and try to follow along with it almost like karaoke, interspersed with video lessons and songs that are meant to demonstrate the lessons from the videos. Cool stuff, but I still suck.

Videos for month 6/7

I recorded 6 videos this month, but one of them is just about my progress with various technique exercises that I haven’t mixed yet. I’ll probably update that here with an edit once I finish editing it all together, since it’s really a bunch of different videos trimmed up and combined, and isn’t really something musical.

Lay Down - Priestess

This is a really fun song that I enjoy quite a bit. The main “riff” was really tricky to pull off and I actually learned the song quite some time ago, but wasn’t really good enough to play it all the way through at tempo until now. I imported the song into Logic Pro, split out the stems, and removed the guitar again - leaving only the bass, drums and vocals. The guitar solo is double tracked in two different positions on the neck, so I recorded that on a separate track and added it in the video. Unfortunately, and this is a lesson for the future, I didn’t realize I should also mix things for phone speakers. For some reason I don’t really understand, the lack of a noise gate in my track doesn’t sound like much at all on my monitor speakers or headphones. But when I listen on my phone, I hear a lot of feedback and unnecessary noise coming from my phone speakers. It’s weird, but I know now to test different types of audio output devices when mastering.

Everlong - Foo Fighters

A fun Drop D song. When I first tried learning it a few months back the down picking was too fast and tricky for me to handle, but I think I was able to pull it off pretty well now.

Foo Fighters - Everlong Cover (6 month guitar progress log)

What I Do - Sons of the East

This song is the example I used earlier about trying to cover a song with that thumb and finger strumming mixed with “chick strumming” from Justin’s lesson. It was also the first recording I did with my new microphones, so it was a good test of how to record acoustic guitar in a proper manner rather than my phone’s microphone. I like this song a lot, really laid back. I again imported the song, split the stems, and took out the original guitar.

Paranoid solo - Black Sabbath

When Ozzy passed I tried to learn the Paranoid solo in his honor. It’s still a bit tricky for me in a couple parts but I think it came out reasonably well - I still have a ways to go with my speed in some sections but I’ve made a lot of progress with speed on solos from some of the technical exercises I’ve been working on.

Paranoid solo attempt - 6 month guitar progress log

And finally, here’s an improv video I did in the key of B Minor. I really like playing along to Elevated Jam Tracks on Youtube when I’m practicing improv. I tried to focus on letting notes breathe, timing, hitting chord tones over their respective chord, staying in key, expressing dynamics, and moving up and down the entire fretboard. I posted this on Reddit asking for feedback, because I don’t really have any source of feedback other than asking people online. For the most part it was pretty well received, though a few people (out of around 30) pointed out that it almost sounds rehearsed or planned out. This was a bit confusing to hear because it is completely improvised, though I did run through it a few times before I hit record to get a feel of the chord timing and rhythm of the track. Since I wasn’t sure what gave off that impression I tried to reflect on it and I believe it could be because I rely a bit too heavily on triads from CAGED, and always try to aim for and hit chord tones from that when the chord changes. This gives the solo this structured type of feeling that may not sound totally improvised, I believe. Basically when I try to improvise over a jam track, I’ll first listen to the track, and hit only the root note on chord changes. Then I’ll identify which “direction” the melody is moving, like up or down in pitch. From that info, with the root notes and the pitch information, I visualize where those triads are in their respective pitch and the scale for that key fits around it, and then finally when I improvise I try to hit the chord tones while connecting them with scale tones in the space between chord changes - in some way that sounds musical or expresses how I feel at that moment. Overall the backing track is quite long, 10 minutes, so I cut it in half. The verse progression is a slower tempo, and goes Bm7 - A - G - Bm7 - A - D G 4 times, then the chorus progression goes G - A - Em - D/F# - G - D - A twice. The last chorus progression loops 4 times. I feel like the solo got better as it went on, starting somewhat slow. I’m relatively proud of how the last chorus progression loops went, starting around 3:55. It’s tough to make a 5 minute solo sound good.

Hopeful Improv in B minor (7 month guitar progress log)

Songs I produced

While I was recording new songs every other day a couple months back, that has slowed down considerably as I’ve started to put more effort into the songs I’m making, or at least become more aware of the things that I need to do to make songs sound better. I’ve put a lot of work into this Japan cover by Yot Club, so I haven’t actually finished producing anything more than one song. I feel slightly bad about this but I’ve still been working on recording / producing every day, and I think it makes sense given how much time this cover is taking and all the things I’m learning from it. This song here is probably the first one I’ve felt deserved a “name” other than just a descriptive title about its context, so it’s called “Stumbling” because that’s what I feel like I’m doing when trying to put it all together. I made all of the tracks, guitars, bass, synthesizers, etc myself. It has no vocals but I tried to get creative with it. The bass is actually just my guitar transposed down an octave, that I tried to EQ to sound more like a bass.

Month 7/8 Goals

For the next month I want to keep doing what I’m doing, more specifically I want to make more progress on the songs I’m working on, and get better at recognizing the intervals I want to hit while improvising rather than feeling like I’m shooting at a dart board in a dim room. I also want to keep practicing my vocals and finish this Japan cover. After that, I want to keep producing more music, and get better at that. I hope to be at a point soon where I can make music that I actually feel is worth publishing online for the public. My main goal is to be able to make music that can adequately express myself creatively in a way that allows me to relieve some of the inner battles I face, or the things I’ve been through, ideally in such a way that would result in music that people would actually want to listen to and connect with on a deeper level.

[Beatup6String]

Ryan - I stumbled onto your LL while searching for stem splitter software… and wow, that’s really good progress just 8 months into your guitar journey! Keep it up!

[theryanbamford]

Thank you! Logic is pretty good at stem splitting for my purposes, just doing covers really. I just recorded a cover of “Old Man” by Neil Young and took out the guitar with the stem splitter and noticed that it also took out the Banjo too, but I guess that’s technically a guitar of some sort so not too surprising.
I hope to progress to a point where I can be considered a decent player, rather than just good for a new player, so that’s a tricky road I hope to navigate soon.

[Beatup6String]

Just in case it came across wrong, I didn’t mean my feedback in any “good for a beginner” way.

You are playing well, and are much farther along than I was at the same point in my journey, the time you are putting in is really paying off!

With regards to stem splitting, I’ve noticed that too. Logic seems to put all the guitar or guitar like parts into one stem. I’m trying to transcribe a couple of blues songs and while it was able to split out the drums, bass piano and vocals into separate stems, the rhythm and lead guitars are combined in one stem.

[theryanbamford]

Sorry not at all, I didn’t mean to imply you meant that - I appreciate it! Just something I’m considering myself for the future. I don’t know if I can be making cover videos like “Peace Sells - Megadeth cover (34 month guitar progress log)”, lol

Yeah, I’ve had the same problem. In order to do a full cover with Logic’s stem splitter, I have to play both the rhythm and lead myself - which is what I did with the Sultans of Swing video

[frito]

All I can say Ryan is HOLY COW! The amount of progress you have made in such a short time is simply amazing. Your dedication shines through on every piece you have shared.

[theryanbamford]

Geez, this is over 4500 words.

This month was more or less the same general progress in all areas - not as drastic as in earlier months but the puzzle pieces of coming together rather nicely. The biggest change and new thing for me was starting to learn how to sing and play at the same time. I have 0 experience singing whatsoever, so learning to do it while playing at the same time is quite the challenge. I also connected more of the fretboard by recognizing what chords fit into each key visually based on a system I’ll explain below, and how the diatonic scale notes fit into that pattern. I learned a lot about acoustic guitar mixing and production, but unfortunately neglected working on my original works much. I spend so much time playing guitar that it’s hard to take time away from that to work on music production. I still have a song in progress but it’s coming along slowly.
I also figured I would update with what my practice routine looks like later in this update.

Progress notes:

• Able to finally sing through a song while playing. My singing voice needs an awful lot of work but I’ve been working on it any time I’m completely alone, like when I’m picking our son up from school in the car circle. The car circle takes so long to go through, about 30 minutes of idling mostly in park. So I have a travel guitar, a Donner Hush X-Pro, that I bring in the car and sing along with. Yousician also has vocals classes so I’ve been going through those and am now on level 2. It’s a bit like Karaoke except it also tracks your pitch and grades you based on how well you could hold the note at the intended pitch.

• I’ve started to work on ear training again and am dedicating myself to make it a consistent part of my practice, even if it’s just for 5-10 minutes a day.

• I learned a trick that helps me identify all the chords in a key rather easily. Keeping in mind the major / minor pattern of chords in the major scale, (Major, Minor, Minor, Major, Major, Minor, Diminished), it works like this: if you start on 5th string with the tonic note, say a C, that would be on the third fret, fifth string. The next chord is up two frets, D, and would be minor based on the pattern. The next chord is up two frets, E, and would be minor as well. Then for the next four chords, you move down to the 6th string, and start 2 frets behind where you started - in this case F, and would be F major. Move up two frets again, G major. Two frets again, A minor. Two frets again, B diminished. Another example, starting on the 6th string: Tonic note: G. First chord is G major, starting on the third fret. Move up two frets, A minor. Move up two frets, B minor. Move up to the 5th string starting on the same fret you began with, C major. Move up two frets, D major. Move up two frets, E minor. Move up two frets, F# diminished. So if I explained that well enough, you can see every chord is only two frets apart, but where the 3/4 (half step part of the major scale) takes place, you switch strings and then either start on the same fret or move back two frets depending on if you started on the 6th or 5th string.

• Connecting last month’s “revelations” with this most recent one, if you take the major scale that starts under your pinky on the 6th string, you can find every note in the scale from those shapes I described in the previous month, and how each of those major scale fingerings connect with each other. In the case of a key with the tonic note on the 5th string, for example C major, the pinky major scale fingering would be on the position of the natural minor chord of that scale - A minor (C on the 8th fret, 6th string). If you started on the 6th string, you just move your pinky to that tonic note and then can expand the scales in that direction.

• Hopefully this picture explains it somehow better than I can.

• 5th String root:
  

  

• 6th String root:
  

  

• Getting noticeably better at rhythm fills, though they’re still a work in progress.

• One thing I’ve noticed is that as I’ve gotten better at guitar, it’s a lot easier for me to learn songs. On the other hand, I’ve been working on more difficult songs, so the overall time and effort it takes is still about the same.

• A few of the songs I’ve been working on, such as Under the Bridge by Red Hot Chili Peppers, I’m now able to play the tricky parts of at full tempo. Now I just have to learn the rest of the song. I sometimes focus on nailing the tricky parts first because then I know I’ll be able to get the rest of the song without issues.

• Learned a several quadads and their positions on the neck; sus2, major7, dom7, and minor 7. I’ve found that sus2 chords are my favorite sounding chords. It’s like beyond the sadness of minor chords, but in a peaceful way?

• Starting to learn how bends can properly be used when improvising. Previously I was bending from the chord tone, which doesn’t always work as well. For example on a IV chord in a 12 bar blues in say the key of A minor, I would bend the D note on the D7 chord. From studying a bit of BB King, I’ve found that it seems to work better to bend to chord tones, instead of bending from them when developing musical phrasing.

• I learned a lot about producing good acoustic sound quality when recording. Stuff like using two microphones effectively, employing saturators, compression, stereo imaging, minor overdrive, mixing wet/dry signals, sending channel busses to aux channels for reverb imaging, etc. I demonstrate that a bit in one of the videos for this month.

• Getting better at difficult techniques used in some different solos I’ve been working on. I’m getting closer to be able to play the Fade to Black solo at full speed effectively.

• Learned a few more songs - my favorite being Fire and Rain by James Taylor. I posted a video of me performing this song in an acoustic guitar players group on Facebook to find some more suggestions for similarly difficult fingerpicking songs and got a lot of good suggestions, a couple that I’m having a ton of fun working on - Windy and Warm by Chet Atkins and Waiting Around to Die by Townes Van Zandt. They are the most difficult fingerpicking songs I’ve worked on but I seem to be pretty good at picking up fingerpicking quickly. It’s easier for me than crazy fast shredded guitar solos by far. I also quite enjoy folk music, so that’s a win-win. When I posted the video to that group I mentioned how long I’d been playing so that people could take that into consideration when coming up with recommendations and the admin of that group (a really good player I look up to in terms of skill) was extremely skeptical and called me out on faking it until I linked him to this thread. I took it as a compliment.

• I’ve started to focus more of my daily improvisation work on 12 bar blues, as it gives a good predictable framework to improvise with. I’m starting to be able to put together a blues solo that feels good to play.

• I’ve started exploring more complex chords when coming up with chord progressions, partly from Justin’s chord explorer series and also from exploring voicings up and down the neck like add9 and 11 chords.

• I’ve taking on another completely ridiculous challenge. I want to learn the free bird solo by the time I’ve been playing for a year and be able to play it well. I started working on it and found it’s mostly actually not too difficult, it’s more of an endurance test with an insane amount of repeated parts quite quickly. Most of the parts I can handle alright, except for the bending in a few parts. I play through the whole song at around 70% speed with a metronome right now as I can handle most of it around that speed without issues. The parts that I do have issues with I practice slower afterwards and as part of my various technique exercises. I think I can get there by January 2026. I recorded a video of me attempting this at 60% speed. It’s mostly pretty awful but it’s a work in progress so I recorded a video for the progress log that I can hopefully look back on and laugh, even though I’m already laughing.

My practice routine:

While practice time and consistency is important, I think it’s equally important to practice intentionally on the things that serve you best to get you towards your goals in a satisfying enough manner to keep you motivated to keep bringing it every day. I don’t claim to be an expert on practice behavior or guitar but what I mean is that I make an effort to try and shift and focus my practice on things that I think best benefit me in a given practice session.

The things I’m working on tend to shift and vary based on my short and longer term goals. My personal long term “vision” goal is to write and produce my own music. I don’t really care if anyone ever listens to it, I just want a creative outlet and to be able to express myself as well as I can with the instrument. To approach that long term goal, I want to learn how to find my voice with the guitar, and find out what types of music I like to play and create. So I learn songs from a bunch of different genres to explore this, and try to figure out how they’re made. I listened to a great podcast with Justin Sandercoe recently where he suggested that once people find what they’re good at, it might be worth exploring that further. I’m doing this to also find what I’m good at and I think I’m getting the impression that I’m good at rhythm and fingerpicking, as well as “knowledge” if that makes sense.

My short term goals would be something like, learning a new song. Middle term goals would be getting a better understanding and freedom of the fretboard, to express myself without the troubling burden of thought. Other examples of middle term goals would be “dreamer” songs, like learning the Free Bird solo or the entirety of Fade to Black. Songs that take a lot of time to get down but in my opinion benefit from getting your foot in the door and starting sooner rather than later.

So with all that in mind, this is what my daily practice looks like on a typical day. These are just averages, not militant time blocks or anything.

6:30am: wake up, take son to school

7:30-8:10am, 30-40 mins - First guitar session:
I’ll usually just work on some of the challenging parts from certain songs that I’m working on, or having trouble remembering. I believe that the act of recalling things helps hammer them in your memory better. I also believe that working on difficult riffs that you can’t do on tempo yet benefits from working on them as often as possible, to get your fingers more accustomed to moving in that fashion.

8:10am -8:30am: Take son to school
8:30am-9:00am: 1.5 mile walk
9:00am-12pm: work
12pm-12:45pm: gym

12:45-1:15pm: ~30 minutes - Second guitar session (if I do it):
This session I might start by touching a couple of the tricky parts of songs I’m working on briefly, again just to work on them as often as possible. Then I’ll do what I call “intentional noodling”, where I’m not really playing any specific song or lick, but coming up with chord progressions in a different key each time and them improvising lead lines within it. They call these rhythm fills and it basically works like this; I’ll pick a random key, say D minor, then identify where those barre chords are all over the neck. In this key it would be D minor, F major, G minor, A minor, A# Major, C major, and E diminished (but I never used diminished chords). I’ll improvise and come up with some chord progressions with whatever strumming technique I’m feeling. This works on rhythm skills, fretboard memorization, and improvising. I recently started also trying to explore using more unique voicings for these chords, like 7, major 7, add 9 and 11 chords. I find I really like how add 9 chords sound. Once I have a chord progression down, I’ll start improvising some lead lines between the chords while noodling, kind of like how Hendrix played in a lot of his songs. The easiest way to get started with that is by identifying that each major and minor barre chord has a specific pentatonic “shape” around the chord of notes that fit well with it, depending on if the root is on the 5th or 6th string. Beyond that, identifying where the major scale fits around that key opens it up further and that’s what I focus on now. The way I identify where the major scale is is where the root note fits under your pinky (if major scale), or under your index finger (if a minor scale). From there I have memorized the intervals and shapes of 4 different major scale fingers that I know all the notes of a key are and try to visualize that while coming up with lead lines between chords. I try to create melodies this way and it’s a lot of fun.

1:15 - 3:45pm: work

3:45-4:15pm: Third session: when I go to pick my son up from school, the car circle takes forever. It’s about 20 minutes of just idling in park. So I have a travel guitar I take in the guitar and practice there as well. Since I’m alone at this time I use this opportunity to try and practice singing while playing since my voice is really deep and I’ve avoided practicing singing until recently.

4:15-6:00pm: work

6:00-6:30pm: Fourth session (if I do it): same as second session.

6:30pm-9:30pm: various responsibilities, dinner, kids homework, getting kids ready for bed, shower, etc.

9:30pm - 12:30/1am: Fourth (or third) guitar session: This is the long one that I spend the most effort on. I usually start with around 30 minutes of working on some technique exercises, scale runs in different patterns, multiple-octave arpeggios, picking exercises, etc. Oftentimes these exercises including challenging licks from a few solos I’m working on, like Free Bird and fade to black mentioned before. I also play through some of the solos I’ve already learned as they serve as great technique workouts. Free Bird in particular is an amazing workout for bending and pentatonic licks. I included a video of some of the stuff I work on here with this month’s progress videos.

Then I’ll work on the next Justin Guitar module. I make sure to watch the video all the way through because oftentimes Justin has some good tips I wouldn’t consider that aren’t necessarily included in the text of that module on the site. I’ll spend about 30 minutes on that video and whatever topic he discusses, sometimes touching back on that module for multiple days until I’ve fully absorbed it and am ready to move on.

After this I’ll alternate between either working on learning a new song or refining my repertoire. If I’m working on refining, I spend about 15-20 minutes playing through a few of the songs I’ve memorized to keep them in my memory and refine my technique, such as focusing on dynamics and minimizing small mistakes. If I’m working on a new song, I’ll usually try to learn it from a Youtube video along with Tabs if it’s not in Yousician. I like Justin Guitar’s Youtube tutorials the most if they’re available as his teaching style is really easy for me to follow and he seems to cover the most different considerations when educating.

At this point, around 10:45-11pm, I’ll use the Yousician app for about an hour. Yousician is a great way to get you playing a lot of guitar, it’s a bit like a treadmill of guitar tabs and my guitar is connected directly to my computer with an interface, so it lets you play along to a lot of songs, slow them down, loop sections, change difficulties, etc. It has everything from very simple 1 string melody songs to extremely fast Iron Maiden solos and everything in between. One of the coolest and most unique features it has that I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else, is every time a song has a bend it shows you a live graph of your pitch while bending, with a desired line for you to line the bend up with as it goes up or down in pitch. It’s a really good way to learn and work on techniques like that. Yousician also scores you based on how many notes you hit in a row, and the timing of your notes. Hitting slightly late, or early, will be worth less points that being right on tempo. The score is a great way to monitor your progress as you will see the scores climb over time as you get better. I’ll usually alternate between working on songs outside of my skill level, different “course” songs that progressively increase in diffuclty, or songs I’m working on memorizing / learning. From about 11:45-12:30 (or 1am) I start to work on the music creation part of my practice. I start by trying to improvise over a backing track and I alternate between simpler stuff like a 12 bar blues, focusing on learning and implementing new blues licks, to more complex chord progressions. If I’m not doing blues style improvisation, I usually start by identifying where the triads are in each chord progression, and making melodies with just the triad notes. From there I start to connect the triads with other scale tones and try to come up with melodies that way. I try to fit in some licks I’ve learned over time and make it musical.

At the end of all that, I’ll usually work on recording new music. I used to practice with a looper but lately I’ve been making actual songs in Logic Pro. I used to make a new song basically every other day a few months back but lately as I’ve learned a lot more about production and mixing, they take a lot more effort to make - like multiple weeks. Given the fact that production training takes away from guitar practice time, I haven’t been committing as much time as I’d like on this. But I have gotten a lot better at learning how to produce music. Finally I’ll go to bed tired as hell, then wake up in 5.5 - 6 hours continuing the sleep deprivation to repeat everything the next day.

Videos for this month:

Fire and Rain - James Taylor
This song was a lot of fun to play and is a heck of a lot of fun to play. I learned a lot about how James Taylor likes to look at his guitar melodies as like he’s “playing a piano”, where the thumb (left hand) plays the bass chords while the melody is played over top of them. I like that the pattern changes up a bit and it was a big jump in complexity from my previous fingerpicking songs.

Fire and Rain - James Taylor instrumental cover (8 month guitar progress log)

New Slang - The Shins (Vocals)
This is the first song I’ve tried singing while playing guitar. It’s probably not the easiest “strumming pattern” to play while first learning to sing but it is a song I have committed heavily to muscle memory so for me it works. I also really like the song. I definitely have a lot of work to do on vocals. It feels to me like my problem is the starting note of a phrase. I can generally hold a note alright, but I can’t simply do speak-singing because my talking voice is so deep. If I raise my pitch, I can hold a note a bit better, but if I raise it too far, then my voice becomes strained and that also makes it more difficult - so I tried to find a balance. Vocals are definitely a work in progress.

There is a Light That Never Goes Out - The Smiths
I know I keep saying this but this is also a really fun song to play. The progression is a lot of fun to work through and I like to really close my eyes and get into the rhythm of this song.

Old Man - Neil Young
The palm muting was tricky to figure out and even Justin had to have a laugh when trying to explain the exact picking technique from the record on the intro bits. I can do the intro better when I’m not recording of course but I’m still pretty happy with how it came out.

Let It Be (solo) - The Beatles
This is just the solo from this song, I tried giving it a shot to test out some of the brit crunch settings on Amphub and it came out pretty well so I ended up recording it. I was pretty hyped that this was the first solo I tried to learn where I feel like I was able to get it right on time with the record with little effort. I think it only took about 25 minutes from when I first looked at it. That’s a notable thing of progress for me because solos were basically impossible for me to get the timing right on not too many months ago.

Let It Be solo - The Beatles (8 month guitar progress log)from my elbows perspective for some reason

Non-Song videos

Acoustic production / mixing:
I recorded this video to show another JG community member the difference in sound quality between recording an acoustic guitar with one microphone and with two. I improvised a few things and played a few mashups of parts of songs to compare them. I also used this opportunity to learn more about acoustic guitar production, such as selective EQ, Compression, Saturation, Limiters, Softerning, Stereo Spread, panning and reverb send busses. If this picture looks confusing, it’s because it is.

Free Bird solo at 60% speed:
This one is rough. This solo isn’t really that technically difficult - what it is however is a ridiculous endurance test and requires what I would consider to be technical mastery of rapid bending. Playing through it at a slower speed is all fine and dandy until you consider the fact that it makes this solo over 10 minutes long. My hands get tired and some of the rapid bending parts feel nearly impossible. However, everything I’m doing right now at one point felt impossible, so I have faith in myself that I will be able to play through this at full speed clean one day.

Practice Techniques:
This video is an example of a few of the different things I work on while practicing. The first batch of clips with my cool button up cruise shirt are improvising lead lines between rhythm chords, like rhythm licks. Full disclosure - these are not improvised for this recording - they are fills that I have improvised in the past and found them catchy enough to remember as I repeated them so many times while playing them. The second clip is a part of me playing through part of the free bird solo at 80% tempo with a metronome - this is a speed I can barely hang on at and certainly not play very clean but I do spend some amount of time working on things that are too difficult for me to really push my speed and capabilities. Then, when I go back to play it at a lower tempo, I find it’s not as hard and sometimes I can push it up further.
The next batch of clips are all a few of the different picking exercises I do that I’ve put together across various resources I’ve picked up. The first is just practicing some multiple-octave apeggios. The second is a tremolo picking exercise I came up with. I basically tremolo pick as long, clean and smooth as I can while trying to use a scale in some way to at least make it musical. The third exercise is a string skipping / alternate picking exercise I picked up from Bernth on Youtube. The fourth is another string skipping / alternate picking exercise I picked up from Michael Angelo Batio and Paul Gilbert. The final one is one where I just come up with a riff and play it as fast as I can for as long as possible until my fretting fingers get sore, I believe this builds endurance, hand coordination and speed but what do I know?

Technique Exercises - Where I'm at at 8 months of playing guitar

Month 8 / 9 Goals:
Looking forward, I want to keep working on getting better at singing, and I want to finish learning a couple of fingerpicking songs I’ve been working on - Waiting around to Die by Townes Van Zandt and All The Best by John Prine. I want to also learn how to sing All The Best while playing.

I want to get better at blues solo improvising as well. I’ve improved a lot recently after studying some BB King and want to work on that more as well, since I’m finding it quite fun. I want to also work on my improvising skills with other types of backing tracks as well. Improvising and singing are my two priorities right now. I love improvising, but I kind of dread singing still.

Beyond that I want to work a bit more on the songs I’ve been producing, and improve on as many other aspects as I can. I don’t really have any music theory related questions at this time I want to explore more. Probably just continue to explore more unique chords when improvising chord progressions.

Until next time,
Ryan

[brianlarsen]

Geez, Ryan… What are you like?!?
Guitar learning on steroids! I only had a quick skim through your log/progress and am not only blown away by your focus and progress, but how do you find the time/energy to share it too?
You deserve some kind of certificate for… well… Everything. So here it is

I’m hesitant to distract you from your stellar progress, but you have mentioned a couple of times your desire to write songs, as well as singing, and indeed appear to be working on those even if not sharing as much.

@theryanbamford

I still have a song in progress but it’s coming along slowly…

@theryanbamford

Improvising and singing are my two priorities right now. I love improvising, but I kind of dread singing still.

I find that the ‘fun part’ of my guitar journey (well, not the improvising), and largely what makes it worthwhile. You know you only get better at what you do, so if that is the ultimate destination, you need to be focusing on it now (along with all the rest).

Crazy Dude!

[theryanbamford]

@brianlarsen Thanks so much! I printed out the certificate and placed it right in my music workbook. I hope you don’t mind, but I forged your signature.

I do update this log with massive walls of text, it might seem like it takes a lot to share but I type ridiculously fast so typing 1000 words takes me probably 6 minutes or so. For specific details and stuff, I log stuff as I go every few days in this workbook (where I placed my shiny new certificate) so I more or less just copy down the notable things here and extrapolate on it a bit. It’s also beneficial for me to write this all down even if no one ever reads it because it gives me the opportunity to deeply reflect each month and set goals for myself in writing.

As for those priorities, they haven’t changed. I’ve been practicing singing for about an hour every night in a few different ways. As ridiculous as it sounds, until this past month I didn’t even know that you were supposed to sing notes. LOL. I guess I could have assumed that but my whole life listening to music I only recognized that there were intervals of pitch that took place while people were singing. I had no idea there were actually notes and keys that you were supposed to sing in. With production as well, every video I make and every recording I do teaches me a lot on that. More on that later… With all that said, here’s my update for this month.

[theryanbamford]

Month 8/9 Progress Log

This month I’ve been focused on

• I’m working on singing while playing a few songs. Those are “Hurt”, “Ghost Riders in the Sky”, and “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash, and “All the Best” by John Prine. I can play the first two while singing reasonably well but have some more practice to go before the playing is automatic enough to be able to focus properly on my vocal technique.

• After posting last month’s video of the first song I sang in a Facebook group for guitar beginners, I got a lot of good feedback about it. For one, I was totally off-key but a reasonable number of people said I sound like I actually have a voice with good potential. 3 people said my voice reminded them of Johnny Cash and two said I sounded like Mark Knopfler. I didn’t even ask for that kind of information so it gave me some hope for the future. Like I said above, until this month I didn’t even know there were notes you sang like every other instrument.

• A big one for me this month is getting more comfortable singing. One reason I’ve gone my whole life without singing was because I was so embarrassed by the idea of sounding bad with my deep voice that I was afraid people would laugh at me, even my own wife and children. I don’t know why but I knew I’d have to get over it if I wanted to pursue this further. I started by going on walks by myself around the neighborhood and singing quietly out loud while listening to songs on my headphones. First further away from houses, like the outer perimeter of our HOA. Then, on the sidewalks around the neighborhood. I’ve gotten to a point now where I can sing in front of my wife and kids without feeling stupid so that’s a huge thing because it means I can practice singing every day now instead of just the one day a week my wife was in class in the morning.

• I finished transcribing the guitar portion of “All the Best” by John Prine, which I feel pretty good about because it has some tricky fingerpicking patterns, though it’s nothing too complicated. This is pretty evident because even the “official” tabs for the song on Ultimate-Guitar are horrifically wrong and every YouTube lesson is also either wrong or doesn’t cover the whole song. Since I want to learn to sing while playing this, I’m also transcribing the vocals. Once I have that done I’m ready to learn it. It’s a bit tricky to transcribe vocals because the rhythm notation for it is totally new to me but again it’s something new to learn.
  

  

• From Justin’s lesson on “How to not suck at singing!” gave me an idea. He brought up the idea of playing a note on your guitar and trying to match it with your voice to work on developing pitch. I found that I was pretty quick at picking that up relatively quick. Then I had this idea: Ultimate-Guitar official tabs have tabs for the vocals as well, and they look just like melody tabs on guitar. So, I started playing each “note” on my acoustic guitar while singing the song and matching the frequency of the vowels in each word with the note on my acoustic guitar while I play it. It sounds a bit weird written like that but if anyone ever tries it out they’ll see what I mean. Then, I try to sing the words ahead of the note, and play the note after I vocalize it, to see if I match. Then as a final test, I put up the guitar and use a pitch tracking app on my phone while I sing it. I check the notes afterwards and see if they’re on target or not. I still have a tendency to land flat on new phrases but I’ve made a lot of progress on it. The picture below is from singing “Ghost Riders in the Sky” by Johnny Cash, specifically the line “Upon a ridge he rested as he went along his way!”
  

  

• I’ve been learning about vocal techniques like breath support, exercises, etc. and incorporating that into my practice.

• The amazing company I work for does a yearly vacation for all the employees and our families, and the president of the company and one of our developers also play guitar. The president / CEO usually will do a campfire singalong at these each year and has been playing guitar for over 30 years. Regrettably, the past two years I missed out on his performance because I drank too much earlier on never even knew they were taking place. I saw the opportunity to play with other people for the first time so I brought both my guitars and made sure to stay sober so we could all play together. The dev also brought his guitar and it was a good time. I didn’t know how to play a majority of the songs but they were all typical campfire songs and were easy enough to pick up on the chord progressions and play along with. We only had two capos so for some songs I tried to play a light accompaniment melody with the vocals based on the key, which was tricky to figure out on capo’d songs on the fly like that. Luckily I hadn’t been drinking that night. We all had a great time and I’m looking forward to next year! This small clip is from that night, it’s a bit too dark out to make anything out since it was late at night and the lights had to be dim due to sea turtles (it was on the beach)

• My performance from last month of Fire and Rain got reshared by James Taylor’s official Facebook page for his fans which was a pretty damn cool notification to get.
  

  

• Faster at my speed / technical exercises, not much else to say there. It’s a slow and gradual thing, playing fast.

• I’ve made pretty good progress on improvising over a 12 bar blues. I learned some licks to play over the V chord from Justin’s list of blues licks and I try to practice a new one and integrate it into my vocabulary every 3-4 days or so. Licks over the V chord were previously one of the holes I had in my vocabulary.

• While I haven’t been focused hard on song production itself (I’ve been hoping the singing practice will lead into this), I did learn more about how you can create effects chains for vocals for my re-make of “Japan” by Yot Club. He uses kind of this dreamy, lo-fi effect on his vocals which I’ve found isn’t from one specific plugin but a series of plugins like overdrive, EQ, compressor, chorus, echo, tape modulation, reverb, autotune, etc. I’ve gotten pretty close but just have to record the rest of the vocals. I don’t think this picture really does it justice of how much effort I’ve accumulated into this so far but there’s 7 layered guitars, a midi drum kit and two vocal tracks. I’ve been procrastinating finishing it because I was hoping to get closer to the vocals to finish it off. Though, he uses quite a bit of auto-tune (flex pitch) anyways so I guess it doesn’t matter. I found an AMA he did on Reddit where he confirmed that he uses Logic Pro so at least we’re using the same tools.
  

  

• I’ve gotten better at fast “chugging” and picking on metal songs. I’ve been working on a few Iron Maiden and Slayer songs and gotten a lot better at being consistent with chugging and palm muting but I’m still far from perfect.

• I’ve made little progress on Free Bird, partly because we were out of town for a week and partly because I was sick all last week as well. I’m working on learning the solo in the Final Countdown by Europe and can do the middle pentatonic lick portions of it at full speed quite well but the fast arpeggios at the beginning and towards the end I can only get to about 85% speed before falling apart. I practice it every night though because it trains my technique and dexterity quite well.

• I learned Time in a Bottle by Jim Croce and was able to perform it for a video pretty good. It’s the hardest thing I’ve done so far by far and I consider it a major accomplishment. I wasn’t planning on learning it just yet, it was on my list of fingerstyle songs to learn though. Then I stumbled upon the tragic story of Jim Croce and the meaning behind the song and it made me tear up quite a bit. I decided to focus entirely on this song because it was so beautiful and I became obsessed with it. It was all I listened to. I somehow managed to pull this off in just under a week. I started learning the song on Wednesday 10/30/25 as I sat around waiting to see if I’d have the opportunity to reconnect with an old friend (that never occurred) and recorded this on Tuesday 11/4/2025. I practiced this song itself over and over again probably about 3 hours a day on average every day. I wanted to learn both guitar parts and play them along to each other in a video with myself playing both parts and it came out well. To give myself the correct timing, I split the actual recorded song into each separate guitar part and played along to the opposite part playing in an earbud in my ear. It was the most difficult song I’ve performed so far with all the difficult chord stretches and synchronized timing necessary between the but I think it came out well.

• Going along with the previous item, I learned a lot about dual acoustic production. I didn’t use any effects or anything but I learned about EQ shaping a bit to give the higher capo’d guitar more presence and more headroom for the open position guitar. I used a compressor as well to different extents, sent each summed stack to its own bus for sending to reverb aux busses with the intent of giving a greater stereo image. I put a minor amount of tape saturation with the tape delay plugin to give it a bit more of a 70s era warmth. I also used stereo spread so they aren’t so completely isolated. Both guitars were recorded with two different microphones. Guitar #1 (Croce part) has Mic 1 panned 70% left, Mic 2 panned 40% left. Guitar #2 (Maury part) has Mic 1 panned 40% right and Mic 2 panned 70% right. Overall I think the mixing came out very well and I’m happy with what I learned here, though I guess most will never be able to full tell unless they’re listening on good speakers or headphones. I can’t really do it all justice in this picture.
  
  

That’s about it for this month. For the next month I plan to finish transcribing “All the Best”, learn to sing it, and keep practicing my vocals. I also want to keep making progress on all my technical exercises and get to a point where I can play these metal songs at full speed - but probably will still need more time on that given all the work I’ve been doing with vocals. One hour a night is basically a third or fourth of my guitar practice time so that takes a bit away from my ability to finish other projects and thus I have no other videos for this month other than the two above.