Day 10 Reflections
By Andrew Watts
Guitar
I don’t have too much to say on the guitar front. I’ve done the first 6 days of Guitareo’s “Iconic Chord Progressions”. So far it’s been
- “Pop” I V vi iv
- “50’s” I vi iv V
- “Jazz” I vi ii V
- “Punk” I V IV V
- “Other Pop” vi iv I V
- “Alt Rock” I IIIb VIIb V
Nothing earthshaking about it. Just good to practice chord progressions and changing chords in fluid playing. I’ve been plugging my guitar into the computer with an iRig HD and using Amplitube to get a basic amp tone and throw in a virtual distortion pedal for some grit on the “Punk” and “Alt Rock” days. Much moreso than with Rocksmith, I can have my volume above the backing volume and really hear what I’m playing and the mistakes I’m making so I can work to correct them.
Oh, and I bought a looper pedal. I’d love to get to the point where I can make a clean loop of one of the progressions and practice playing something else on top.
Drums
I’ve been sticking with the 30 Day Drummer Level II challenge. Week one has been working up to doing a four on the floor bass drum with snare on 2 & 4, sometime switching to cross sticks, 8th notes on the hi hat, opening on the & of 4, and on day 5 adding in a crash on 1 instead of a hi hat every 4 bars.
It has been a bit of an experience, because this is the first thing I’ve done on my electronic drum kit and the first thing I’ve done since 30 Day Drummer last year on the practice pad. I’m noticing a lot of technique issues. To start with, it took me a couple days before I could do the 4 on the floor, and then another day to be able to switch between it and 1 & 3. Still maybe 65% on opening the hi hat on the & of 4. Cross sticking has been weird because my kit tries to detect whether your hand is on the head to choose between a rim shot and cross stick and it isn’t perfect, so it’s really jarring when a random rim shot plays.
But also I’m noticing how bad my dynamics are. I need to sit down and just practice playing each drum and cymbal (especially kick and snare) with different dynamics and just be consistent and intentional.
Today I went down and slightly rearranged the kit. I noticed from watching some Drumeo videos that I have the snare too far back and the kick pedal and hi hat too far away. Next time I go down to practice I’m hoping the tweaking makes it easier to play
Music reading / Piano
This has been interesting because I wasn’t originally planning to do this. But being able to read music is important if you want to get away from just tabs.
Frankly, it has been extremely hard for me. The first couple of days doing one hand at a time and mostly chromatic, 3rds or 5ths was easy. But then it started mixing in two hands and then two hands doing different things. And it’s fallen apart pretty badly the last few days.
Thankfully, the Read Music in 30 Days page has a downloadable PDF. So last night I printed out days 8-11 so I can work on them outside of the lessons and potentially mark them up with a pencil in the spots where I’m struggling. Today was the first day of week 3 (they’re doing 5 day weeks) and I took the instructor’s advice and just did one hand because I was stuggling. What I noticed doing that is that I am really dying on treble clef but bass clef is relatively ok. I think I’m going to take the printouts and both write finger numbers (especially on the right hand) but maybe on the notes I keep missing, I’ll write the note name so I can work on internalizing them.
Mandolin
I just did the mandolin one day, taking the first song (“The Blue Danube”) in the Hal Leonard Mandolin Playalong Classical Themes book. I’d love to return to it later, but it’s bottom priority right now.
Final notes for the (10 day) week
One thing that has really stood out to me is that trying to do three things each day is insane. Once one of these Musora challanges ends (I think the guitar progressions is first), I’m going to stick to no more than two things on a given day, even if I alternate a bit day to day.