The 1-to-1 Sessions

Hi Guys, have found some time to write a few words about my 1-2-1 session with Justin that I was kindly awarded with by wonderful people from this Community (thank you again)! I am not a great story teller so instead of a lengthy intro I will just jump straight into business :smiley:

My lesson didn’t go very well originally as Justin… completely forgot about me! Turns out he got himself completely sucked into content creation and sort of got side tracked which had our lesson rescheduled by next couple of weeks. When we have finally synchronised our calendars (and it took a while due to some other commitments me and him had) we finally made it and got to do the lesson after all :slight_smile:

My main focus on the lesson was to get some help with my late cover of Slow Dancing in a Burning Room and how to get it better. I first played the whole bit and Justin made some useful comments that helped me (hopefully) improve a bit. Obviously I made LOTS of mistakes while playing live so main focus was on me loosing my rhythm and that if you loose that it becomes a lot less attractive to the listener regardless of how many fancy licks you are going to showcase.

So for about 2 weeks I really took it to heart and I recorded myself quite a lot and played around with a metronome running in the background just to get the rhythm better. As you are aware it is still patchy here and there and will require some further work.

Interestingly Justin wasn’t that impressed with original recording I based my cover on as it had plenty of stuff that were off the main beat and running away from the main rhythm. I haven’t noticed that before, although I listened (and played) it a lot so probably got used to it. I was planning to play this song on one of our Open Mics once but don’t think I will do that now. For once too many inaccuracies in the first places and second the rhythm comment makes sense and this one is definitely all over the place. I found some comfort at least that this is not entirley my fault but recording’s itself :smiley:

From that we touched on a tone and how to get it as close to the original as possible. Justin clearly knows his stuff and he recommended me all the gear I probably can’t afford in this lifetime ha! But Katana I think gives me some possibilities and gets me to a level that is satisfying to an bedroom amateur such as myself. He did say that this track was played on his recent Workshops in Italy and he had some patches specifically for Katana which he kindly shared with me. I used his clean tone and slightly fiddled with it to make it more like the one from cover I covered, and dirty tone I used the same one as I had before as I thought it will sound overall a bit better (as it wasn’t straight off John Mayer’s performance).

Overall very happy with the lesson and getting to know the process how to build a tone resembling song we want to do. He did share with me a quite valuable advice to listen closely to recording while playing with the knobs on my amp and changing it live until you get the tone as close as you can. Also he recommended me an amp simulator that even Mark Knopfler apparently uses for his recording. I have the name saved somewhere on my desktop which at the moment I am away from so for those interested I can always fill the gap in the future :wink:

Last but not least I wanted to ask about the harmonics and how they ring out when playing around 7th fret (wink wink to @TheMadman_tobyjenner ) as I have this issue whenever I practice Can’t Stop song. Justin’s word of advice was to make sure you are trying to mute it either across the whole fret or in two spaces (e.g. fretting hand and strumming hand whenever you can). I did tell Justin off that his Can’t Stop lesson is really bad :rofl: which he appreciated and said that he really needs to take this one down off the website as this was a song request made by someone he knew so wanted to get it out quickly. He did say that he plans to redo it at some point in the future.

Overall lesson went very quickly and I had much fun while having it. Learnt a lot and hopefully became more aware player now - thanks Justin!

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