Again not been doing a daily entry for each practice day this week, and I believe this is my first entry of the month. Being a little busy does that. Anyway, to shortly summarise the last couple of days, on Sunday I learnt just how much of a workout for the wrist it is to strum chords at 120bmp for 90 seconds. It may not sound like much (and if you’ve got a dirty mind you can go away now thank you) but it makes you realise just how much band rehersal is important when you’re planning a gig. That is if you’ve got a band, which I don’t, and probably never will, but that’s beside the point. Monday and Tuesday were respectively alternate picking and string skipping. As a side note, I was quite pleased to hear Andy James from lick library recommend a practice routine quite similar to what I do daily so I must be doing something right. When you reach a point where you can start adding tiny little flourishes to the licks at reasonable speeds, it makes the practice of those exercises that much more pleasant as it starts giving you a feel of control.
Today was the bend exercise and again it was relatively simple to practice, and so with these simple exercises you can start taking little aspect of the practice and really focus on them. So today I chose to make sure I’m controlling those excessively ringing notes which often happen in licks with bends in them. It wasn’t a complete success but just being aware of practicing that was enough to make it worthwhile. Afterwards I had another jamming session as usual (time permitting) and then caught the following video:
I’ve been following Dave Weiner’s lessons on and off for a while but sometimes they hit the nail right on the spot, so I got myself another jamming session in Gm with a different backing track (as the one before was already in Gm) and it’s quite interesting to focus on just playing 2 strings. One thing for sure is that my hands aren’t quite ready for on-the-spot fast licks so a little more practice before I can start hammering the Kirk…. ahem 😉