07April2024 - I am continuing to progress in Grade 3 Module 21 and consolidate Grade 2 skills. I practice Justin 6 days a week. On Sundays I decided last year to use the church guitar (contemporary music) training DVDs from Musicademy (of the UK) since I had it laying around unused from 2007. I had already finished the 3 beginning DVDs and now going through the 3 song lesson DVDs, which just have chords and strums for songs and no lyrics, so they provide additional guitar practice. Here are a couple of examples. I had to transcribe the chord chards, strum patterns and finger style pattern by hand since I didn’t have any TAB or chord charts to use, so I guess that is also good practice. I only practice 20 to 30 minutes on Sunday so it takes a long time to transcribe and practice the short song segment but I am in no hurry on my “day off”.
Here is my 1st hand written chord chart:
Here is the practice song piece (I left out the F#m and G#m repeat segment):
Here is the other chord chart (I would have used GuitarPro but I haven’t learned how to put chord diagrams anywhere on the page):
and the other song lesson played from the transcribed page:
I didn’t include the song titles for 3 reasons:
1 - to reduce the chance of copyright issues
2 - to reduce the appearance of promoting religious songs
3 - mainly because I haven’t actually heard the original songs and don’t know them, so it is mostly irrelevant.
I am just including this two videos to show what I have worked on on my extra days for the last few months (e.g. I worked on the second song for 7 Sundays in Jan and Feb)…
I have also added some exercises from the Blues Guitar from Scratch book by Bruce Emory to my Module 21 practice routine to keep it interesting. Here is a recording I made of one of my favorite exercises where you play a harmonized version of the blues shuffle for E and A chords with thumb and one finger. It sounds a little like the intro to Clapton’s Change the World
GRADE 2 Consolidation demonstrations
For Grade 2 consolidation progress I have made records of my playing the E minor pentatonic, C major and A minor pentatonic scales and a shord demo of there power chords with an intro showing the master of proper string muting.
Playing the E minor pentatonic scale at 80, 100 and 120 BPM with all down picking
E minor pentatonic scale demonstration
Playing the C major scale at 80, 100 and 120 BPM and alternate picking:
Playing the A minor pentatonic scale at 80, 100 and 120 BPM. I started with alternate picking and then at faster speeds I switched to all down picking without thinking since that is how I had learned in the past. I added a demo of the more complicated 3 ascending and descending pattern at 100 BPM since I have practiced that in the past, even before learning via Justin guitar.
A minor pentatonic scale demonstration
I played a demo of power chords with an intro showing the proper muting technique while picking individual notes for 6 and 5 string power chords:
I recorded all the grade 2 skill demos in one sitting. I wasn’t playing any song in the power chord video, I was just improvising a progression to show the different power chord movements.
aww … I wish you a lot of fun with the Blues Immersion…who wants to play the Blues is so very lucky at the moment as we know Justin has been putting so much effort in the course and since it’s something he definetely loves I believe it’s going to be amazing stuff all the way through!
