It was a nice warm sunny evening which put me in an uplifted
mood for my lesson which I was hoping would keep me feeling relaxed and not
make the playing at times feel like I am fighting through it.
We started off hearing how I was getting on with the Oasis
song “Half the World Away”.
It took me a few minutes to get started with lots of nervous
false starts and I getting my fingers entwined with the strings. I did manage
to eventually start the song and get pass the intro and into the first verse of
the song. Again as seems to be my problem I was rushing it too much and again
it’s a case of keeping the rhythm constant. I get the rhythm correct at the
start and then I concentrate far too much on what cords I am playing and
getting ready for the change that I forget the rhythm and it speeds up and up.
We tried some techniques to combat this. The teacher would
play the song to give me an idea of the (much slower) rhythm and I would play
along to this. This at first did not go too well as I think I was listening to
the song too much and would lose what I was doing. He then would clap out the
beat I needed to be in rhythm with to help. Once I eventually started in time
and not rush or come in far too late, this did have some success. The main
thing I had to do is trying playing the song slower than what it would be and
then by some crazy reason I would have the correct rhythm.
I now had a go at tackling the chorus which I have sort of
dabbled with but to no great success. The cord changes on this part are for me
far more complex with Am to C to E then to Am which has all the fingers moving
everywhere. I had a few very slow start stop goes of this with the rhythm going
straight out of the window. The worse part of the chorus is the Fm Bar cord. Stretching
my fingers in this way is proving a challenge and after a few minutes of
getting nothing but a dull thud I had to stop as my hand was aching. I will now
look to practice this chorus part a lot.
We than decided to go through the other two bar cords I have
to practice. These do not sound any better at the moment but I know it is
practicing them every day that will get them sounding better eventually.
The teacher also thought it was time that on some of the
cords that I now start to muffle out the last E string. Of all the cords that I
have so far if they are not an E type or being used in the cord like G the top
E string should not be heard. This can be done by either muffling with the
thumb or if you like the finger holding down the rttt string touching this as
well. I had a go at using the thumb as this seemed better as I could get into
bad habits moving fingers over on other strings that need to be ringed out
clean. The A was the most difficult to do with the bottom of my hand touching
the first E string.
We finished off the lesson looking at my old favourite the
Green Day song “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”.
Again the keeping rhythm was my problem with me going far
too fast. As I go so fast I make many mistakes and do not give myself time to
change from one cord to another. Once I slowed down the mistakes (still there)
where fewer.
Again on this song I had to tackle the chorus as I had only
really been doing the first verse. Because the rhythm changes here and the cords
move all over the place it took me a few moments to get my head around them.
The worst part was the B7 cord at the end of the chorus which would prove
difficult.
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