MAY 2023 UPDATE
April Retrospective
April was a fantastic month. I feel I improved a ton!
Technique goals - I had specific goals about being able to play certain things at certain BPMs (above). I haven’t achieved any of these as I almost did not practice technique at all.
Songs - My goal was to revisit the blues songs I knew and add one more song as a stretch goal. I did not do any of these.
General Learning - I was going to finish Justin’s grade 2. I did not have a look at the course at all this month
You will ask - Well, Serhat, if you haven’t achieved any of your goals, why do you say it was a fantastic month?
Because I did several other things:
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I participated in whopping 3 events! I have a soft goal of doing one performance or jam each month. In April, I played 3 songs on the bass at a jam, played the Justin open mic, and played 3 songs on the guitar at another jam.
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For the first jam where I played the bass, I figured out the bass lines of the 3 songs entirely by ear. Then at the jam, I could play these without messing up too much. I even had to transpose one song on the spot and that did not go too badly.
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On the Justin jam, I switched the song I prepared at the last minute.
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For the other jam, I learned 6 songs although only 3 of them were played. I learned one of these the night before, and 5 of them on the morning of the jam. Nothing fancy like guitar solos but I could learn the chord progressions and rhythms fine.
So this all increased my confidence in my overall goal of becoming a mediocre guitarist and a good musician - not necessarily playing songs at a very high skill level, but being able to adapt to and function in different situations.
In terms of practising skills:
- I know a few blues licks but they are either too basic (the ones from Justin’s very first blues lick lesson) that I’m not skilful enough to compose a continuous melody line from them, or too complex that I can’t properly use them. Instead, I learned 3 other licks that are good sounding and rhythmically simple so I can execute them at a good level. I practised improvising using these 3 licks and modifying them a bit on a few consecutive days to solidify them.
- I spent some time figuring out triad chord shapes on strings 2, 3, and 4 and thought about how to connect these. For e.g., if I’m playing a I-chord triad and the next one is a-IV, which notes can I use to connect these so I can do a bit more than strumming I for the whole bar and jumping to IV at an instant? This is not simple at all and there’s a whole world to discover and get familiar here.
- I practised being able to play a blues shuffle:
- In any key
- With at least two turn-around options
- At an instant without preparation.
Not quite there yet but I made progress.
May Status and Goals
I won’t have very specific, number-based goals for May. High-level goals are:
- Playing at least one performance or jam as usual
- Very, very luckily, I got myself invited to play guitar at a pub gig in July. Learning as many songs for this one as I can
- On blues rhythms, keep practising shuffles and get more comfortable.
- On blues improvisation, learn and incorporate more licks.
- Make more progress on connecting chords with melody lines.
Thank you so much if you read this far. That’s all for now. I’ll report back.