Lesson Twenty Tuesday 21st May 2013

I had been practising mostly the Oasis son "Half the World Away" and pretty much nothing else. My Mrs has told me that she thinks it is sounding better but I still feel there is plenty of work on it.

So I started off my lesson with this song.

The intro to this song still sounds a bit dodgy with the Fmaj7 not sounding very crisp at all. The first verse went through OK and then the chorus come and this is the part I am still struggling on.

The changes to Am and the change from D7 to G and then G7 still have big pauses and I know I have to practise this more and more to get rid of this part. The worse part seems to be the change from D7 to G which I suppose is because all your fingers go in a completely new shape and some of the fingers have to travel a fair bit.

Once I had gone through it once the teacher gave me some encouraging tips and explained that I was playing it too fast. This has been a constant problem and I can only compare it to when I was learning to drive where I had a lead foot and would speed along too fast. I can only assume its a nervous reaction and I need to relax and not be so tense and enjoy it but notes (there are loads of them) and all.

We played the song so I could get the correct speed and I had another go. The speed was OK at first but at one point (in the chorus) I lost my way with my fingers getting caught all in the strings, I then tried to catch up and actually sped past as I was not listening to the song but just obsessing with what I was doing.

We did this excises many times and slowly but surly my speed did come down. This did improve my chords (well some of them) too.

I need to practise the chorus a lot but I am considering recording my progress on this song and putting it on You Tube to show how bad I am. Maybe I could get some pointers on where I need to improve.



The second part of the lesson we looked at the Pink Floyd song "Wish You Were Here" and the lead part. This is so I can learn some new techniques not just rhythm.

My teacher kindly put on the fingers that I would have to use. The 2/4 is what I was told is a Slide up. The idea of the slide up is you strike the first note and slide down to the next position and if done right you should hear this note too. I practised this part a few times but the pause between each not while I found the right one was so long you could not call it a tune.

A great lesson and the hour seems to go so quick.