Practise Diary - Grade 1 & 3

Great stuff! There's enough there to pass if you had to take the exam tomorrow but of course we're aiming for a distinction! Hats off for posting and I've issued you your Founder Member's badge as one of the first 10 to do so here! I've watched each through a few times and spotted a few things that are easy targets:

1) In Sunshine of Your Love the note on beat 3 of the second line here is getting chopped short ... practising with the foot tap (and count) and making sure it rings until you tap beat 4 should cure that quickly.

2) In ICAUFO (from 44s) when the change from melody to chords hits looks like a bottleneck. Getting better at forming the C chord mid-air (on the off-beat/up-foot) is the cure and the easiest way to do that is to improve changing your C chord to itself!

Shout out your current top speed here to put a marker down to work against!

3) There are a few timing issues in Dakota which will be transformed once we've tied it down to a foot tap. On the physical side finger preparation (same idea as for chords) should help ... eg. you can have the first fingered note AIMED and ready to FIRE to the fretboard while playing the initial open strings (which eliminates the need to change hand position there). HOWEVER ... All the notes in the intro are from an E chord. Try it with a full open E chord held down throughout (even though you won't be playing all the fingered strings; there's no need to move the left hand at all now. Pick-wise the intro should also smooth out quickly by practising following a strict alternating pattern (down-up) tied to the foot. Will look forward to seeing what you make of that lot on Saturday (when power chords will be on the menu)!

Hi Paul,

I hope you're well.

As promised please see below for the updated performances almost 2 weeks on.

Sunshine of your love

ICAUFO

Dakota

Best,

Doug

All taking shape nicely and each is definitely a jump ahead of the previous recordings to my ear. Next level for each I'd propose: 1) Sunshine of Your Love The next big difference will come from hitting the power chords like a kid does with a tennis racket. We looked at the muting and I'll bet you're not far off with it now. Ditch the open A in that section for a beefy 3 string power chord too! It's also not to late to think about moving up to the 10th fret:

Not too much changes but doing so would open the door for some probable brownie points. 2) ICAUFO All sounding good and smooth with the C chord no longer standing out as being awkward. How do your measurements on that look? We could make the picking a bit easier; one likely useful addition being the use of "rest strokes" (click here for an example) when picking patterns that move across the strings one at a time. Will elaborate on those on Saturday. Elsewhere I'll bet a few "woodpeckers" would fit the bill well to replace (or assist) your palm-mutes. Experiment with using the right hand fingers (as well as the pick) to kill the sound when "pecking". 3) Dakota

Holding the chord down on the intro is a plus to me and allows as a possibility hitting more than one string for added sound. There's nothing there that stands out as being problematic but as ever we can always find ways to add a little something! Here's some possible icing for the cake in a small loop with a twist or two!

A fair bit of food for thought Anything I haven't mentioned you'd like to zoom in on?

Hi Paul,

I hope you are well.

I thought i'd post on here again as I had my grade 1 exam on Monday. Everything went well so we will just wait and see what the results are.

The examiners aren't allowed to tell you how you did on the day, but he did say that I shouldn't be worried about passing so i'm taking that as a good sign that it's either a distinction or high merit.

So now it's onto grade 2, which i'll start a new thread for when i'm ready to record some video.

Best,

Doug