I’m not much of a planner.\u00a0 I often plan about 30 minutes ahead, or less. Like right now for example. 9 minutes ago I was practicing some songs on my guitar. Fletch and I plan to climb this weekend. So I knew I had to keep\u00a0 my skills fresh. (I plan farther ahead for climbing trips because it involves other people.) As I was playing, I thought, I should write about what I learned, here.<\/p>\n
9 minutes ago I was working on “When I was your man” and “Sweet baby James” plus “Shallow”. Those hurt my fingertips. I’ve been spending an hour a day practicing Blackbird. But it only uses 2 fingers, so the other ones got soft. I hate soft fingers! Those steel guitar strings can feel like razor blades. I know, first world problems and all.<\/p>\n
So like anyone faced with pain, I switched to Blackbird…using my harder finger pads. As I came into the complexity of the song, which is all played from memory (no sheet music), a little voice in my head said “try looking two chords ahead”. In other words, as you play the current picking pattern on a chord, visualize the next two\u00a0 chord positions on the neck of the guitar.<\/p>\n
So I start planning 4 seconds ahead, all while picking an incredible complex chord pattern. I’m seeing the next two finger positions as I’m playing the current one.<\/p>\n
There must be a way to put the pattern on paper. I learned it on youtube, and he’s all visual. He says things like fret 5 on the B string, fret 3 on the A string<\/strong>.<\/p>\n But in addition to that, he’ll spec out the picking pattern for that position, which also plays an open G string several times, depending on how long that position (chord) is played. As you can probably tell, I’m having a lot of fun with this.<\/p>\n I’d thought about taking guitar lessons when I retired…but youtube is getting so good….seems like close enough. See my previous post for the youtube link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m not much of a planner.\u00a0 I often plan about 30 minutes ahead, or less. Like right now for example. 9 minutes ago I was practicing some songs on my guitar. Fletch and I plan to climb this weekend. So I knew I had to keep\u00a0 my skills fresh. (I plan farther ahead for climbing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5309"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5312,"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5309\/revisions\/5312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websterart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}