It seems to become easier to group several days of practice into one post than trying to write one for each. Especially when some patterns start to emerge from one day to the next. For instance, Sunday being too tired, I postponed the daily routine to the next day so Monday I did 2 sets of exercises and whether this was caused by the slightly lengthier practice, I’m not sure but I seem to have found a break point in some exercises when practicing at more than a certain speed. It’s certainly the case for straight chord changes in 16th notes at 120bpm. That was so fast I’m even questioning if anyone even play chords in that kind of rhythm that fast. I can’t even figure out the best way to grip the pick without it flying off somewhere.
With alternate picking this week, the problem I was having was getting my head round doing triplets slowly. This was interesting in that doing them slowly (i.e 40 bpm) was difficult because I tried to do 1__23 instead of 1_2_3 and fitting the regular pattern within 2 beats was surprisingly challenging, not to mention frustrating. But then, arriving at certain speeds it made it rather hard to keep up and 120bpm was certainly quite hard. I keep telling myself that with time, I’ll figure out how to relax into playing faster and there’s no point trying to force through obvious limits as it’s more likely to do harm than good.
Yesterday I also found the exercise to reach a limit at 120bpm. It was basically octave shaped alternate picking across the E shape of A minor pentatonic and was quite easy until it felt like it was going out of control and my mind wasn’t able to keep up with my fingers, it’s quite hard to explain. It wasn’t an utter disaster but I was surprised by the difference 12 bpm makes.
Paradoxically, today’s bend exercise was supposed to have a “tricky” picking pattern… Well I didn’t have any real trouble with it and pretty much sailed through the exercise, so that just confirms where strengths and weaknesses really lie, and it’s good in a way that I can start to identify which bits I ought to work on more often, and which I don’t have so much problem with.
Finally today I went back to Guitar Pro for some work on Mighty Turtle Head and I’m definitely pleased I invested in the software. One great thing you can do is isolate a piece you want to work on and loop it at the speed you want, and well I did just that and you can get things under your fingers pretty quickly when they loop nice and clearly. I think when I have time I’ll have to return to previous tunes and after fixing the tab, getting some serious work done on some of the weaker areas of the piece.