This is the hardest thing I’ve done yet but I’m feeling pretty good about how it came out and wanted to share.
The biggest hurdle, aside from learning the song twice and trying to play it through without mistakes, was keeping the tempo as close to identical as possible between the two. If one guitar drifts even a little the entire song would become an audible mess. Both progressions are in the key of D Minor, with one played further up the neck. I found that the actual recording has one guitar panned left and one panned right, so with Logic Pro I removed the vocals and split that stereo image into two mono tracks, then played the opposite track in my hidden left ear bud while I performed one track for time-keeping purposes. Though the picking patterns and note choices significantly differ between the two, I found that the bass notes always land with each other (and confirmed that with the audio waveform) so that was my headlight in the darkness.
I also added a “1-2-3” drum kick to the beginning of the mono track in my ear and put a staggered one at the end so that I could time looking away from my guitar, at myself, and giving each other a head nod. I also envisioned simultaneously standing up and giving each other a hi-five right before the video abruptly ends but my video editing skills aren’t that spectacular and it proved a bit too clunky to pull that part off.
That’s very clever Ryan, and sounds very nice.
And I remembered reading your introduction to the Community earlier in the year, and checking back confirmed my recollection you only started playing guitar earlier this year.
Some progress! You have obviously put in a lot of time and effort to get to a level it would take most years to achieve.
Respect
Richard
@Richtrfc , I appreciate it! It’s been a very busy year for sure. I’ve been able to progress pretty effectively with all these amazing resources we have now like Justin Guitar and trying to use my practice time as effectively as possible, and an awful lot of it. I’m trying to transition from a “good for x months” kind of performance to just a good one and I feel like I’m getting there. I originally started playing guitar to have a creative outlet and escape from some emotional trauma and quickly found that the more I played, the less I thought about negativity. So, I immediately jumped to playing as much as possible and enjoy every minute of it.
Impressive performance! I know that after enough practice of a particular fingerstyle riff you can enter into a kind of reverie headspace where muscle memory allows your focus to broaden and, as you said with the baseline of that song, you get caught up in the rhythms and harmonies of the other instruments. I’m curious whether you had gotten to that point with either of the guitar parts. If not, your mental discipline at keeping time while still needing to concentrate at transitions is amazing! I’ll add that at least for me getting to the point of reverie even for a simple fingerstyle riff takes many hours of practice. Hats off to you regardless of whether you found it easy or hard.
@tophatjm Thank you! I’d like you to answer your question but I’m not entirely sure what you mean - the chord changes do take place on each bass note between the two but the strings picked for each chord (and in which order) can vary sometimes multiple times per verse so it was more a matter of getting those patterns totally internalized without thinking. Then, the timing of each pattern sometimes differs from the other guitar as well, so it was also a lot of memorizing the timing and strings picked for each chord as it relates to the other guitar, and how that pattern fits in between the bass notes. The double-stopped major 6 intervals after each verse / chorus phrase always line up so it’s a good chance to reset the tempo feeling.
I practiced almost nothing but this song for about 7 days straight, probably 3-4 hours a day. One thing is that when I try to memorize a tricky thing to memorize, I try to replay it as many times as possible. Any time I can pick up the guitar and play through it I will, which is a little more convenient at least with this song because it’s only two and a half minutes long. So, after dinner, before I go to sleep, when I wake up, after I drop off the kids at school, after a meeting, after using the bathroom, etc. I feel like, and I’m pretty sure Justin mentioned this in a module, that the more often you recall something the better it hammers it in.
I definitely did not find this easy and I’m not ashamed to say it took me about 2 and a half hours straight to record both parts without making a notable mistake.
Super job. Can you recommend a specific tutorial for this (tab progression pattern(s) etc). Was there someone specific you used? Perhaps you did it all your own.
Thanks!! For a good majority portion of it, I used this guys tutorial. He did a separate long video for each guitar part. However, when I split the audio apart into separate tracks to learn each guitar part from the actual song, I noticed that he was wrong in a few parts.
For example on Maury’s capo’d track, in this video during the verse portion that starts with a Gm chord on the 10th and 12th fret, he says to arpegiate it from the lowest string to the highest and back again. That is correct the first time, but the second two times it’s done with a Travis picking style that I was able to figure out easily by listening to it. All the shapes and chords are right though. I can post the two individual guitar parts I split out of the record if you’d like to give it a go!
