Lesson Twenty Two Tuesday 4th June 2013

I started off my lesson going through the picking exercise I have been practicing on the Pink Floyd song “Wish You Were Here”.

I have been trying to get to grips with this very small section of the song and it is a very handy exercise to do on my guitar at home when it is late as it is not very loud which I am sure my kids and certainly the local dogs appreciate.

My problem with this is that I am not very precise on the strings and I feel that I am probably plucking them with too much force which results in me striking all sorts of strings at the same time. My first time doing this exercise in the lesson went pretty much the way it has been in practice. I would start plucking every note and there would be a very long pause between each note. As I get more comfortable on what I am doing the pause will get smaller but sometimes in my haste the wrong string would be struck. Getting my hands coordinated is going to take time as I am very clumsy in real life and patting my head while rubbing my stomach is a skill I am not naturally gifted with. After a while I did get a bit of the tune and cutting the part I have to do down into sections (four on this one) did help me. I will need to practice this more and finally connect all the sections together. The other part I have to work on is the direction that I pluck the strings. There is a logical direction to pluck the string so that you are ready for the next part. At the moment if I pluck in the correct direction is more luck than anything, in fact I am very fortunate if I just hit the one string at time. I found out too that what I thought of as slide down note is in fact slide up as sliding towards the sound box of the guitar is up and away is down which I naturally assumed was the other way round.

We then decided to have a little relax time by going through how I am doing on the Oasis song “Half The World Away”. 

Apart from the massive pauses in the chorus and the bar chord that I still have not perfected which I know will only come with practice my problem has been going too fast. The first try round again I started to speed off. To combat this the teacher put on the song so that I could get the correct speed. With the song playing and the teacher adding in a beat to go with I sort of got in time and when I did lose it (in the chorus) I was able to pull myself back into the song. Once I have done this song a few times I relax and don’t get so worried about what I am doing. When I do this I flow so much better and I enjoy playing the song. It’s like what that famous philosopher Bruce Lee once said “Don’t think just do” or something like that anyway.

We then went onto start the next song to practice which is Radiohead’s “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” which is a favourite song of mine and I apologies in advance to Thom Yorke and co for murdering your great song. 

The first part I need to learn all involve the A Chord in one way or another. I have got to move from Am

to Asus4

to Am to Asus2

while plucking individual strings so this is a good song for the plucking and keeping the correct chord.

Going through this the idea seems easy with chord Am to start then add finger four to the second string to make chord Asus4 then off again to Am then take off finger one to make Asus2. There is a pattern to it and it makes sense. However add in the plucking strings and thinking too hard its like riding a unicycle and juggling to me.

The teacher then discussed with me what other song I would like to learn that would take over from “Half the World Away”. I was not sure as I am pretty easy going on what ever song but can appreciate if you know the song it makes it easier to know when your going wrong or for me at the moment when I am going right.

The teacher was trying to think of songs that would be OK and was just playing different things to his self. Most of it did not make much sense but I thought I recognise one tune. It sounded like the start to “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None The Richer. It was not deliberate but he thought that maybe a good song to look at and I am happy to have a go of that one as I know the song.