A reader of How to Practice Guitar and Train Your Creativity recently emailed me asking about how to apply some metronome exercises from my book to Piedmont style fingerpicking (often referred to as Travis Picking).
His Question Considering your advice below, how would you apply it to songs?
I am learning to fingerpick blues, mostly Piedmont style (often erroneously called “Travis picking”).
The bass alternates between two bottom strings, usually either six and four or five and four, and are almost always quarter notes.
Note: This article is entirely focussed on songs that you can play, but can’t play at the required tempo. We’ll cover what it means to “play” in the Pre-Routine section below.
Over the last few months I’ve been working on a baroque keyboard piece, which I’ve transcribed for two guitars - hopefully I’ll have it released on my Youtube channel soon.
Being baroque, it’s quite intricate - lots of 16th notes, stretches and large jumps and transitions.
Recently a reader asked, “Why is it when I’m playing guitar to myself and practising I sound fine, but when I record it sounds awful?”.
This is a very common experience for beginner-intermediate guitarists, and there are a couple of reasons for this, so let’s look into them and what we can do about it.
Limited attention When we are practising guitar, we are working on something new (remember the distinction between playing and practising that we discuss in the book.
Chord Progression This track has the following chords:
i7 iv7 Cm7 Fm7 In the backing track we start with the chords high up on the neck, slowly playing down the beck using different inversions.
Improvising This track uses the natural minor scale.
You can improvise over it using the following scales:
Natural minor Harmonic minor Minor pentatonic The blues scale You can also use arpeggios for the different chords.
Over the last couple of weeks a couple of readers have emailed to ask about finding motivation. One reader asked for tips on finding motivation when the more youthful goals of attracting girls and being a rockstar no longer apply.
So in this weeks post we’ll look at motivation, what it is and how to find it.
What is motivation? Motivation is defined as:
a reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way
Chord Progression This track has the following chords:
i9 viø iiø V7 Bm G#ø C#ø F#7 In the backing track we start with the chords high up on the neck, slowly playing down the beck using different inversions.
Improvising This track uses a mixture of minor modes.
The i9 is common to the natural, harmonic and melodic minor scales.
viø is only present in the melodic minor.
iiø is in natural and harmonic minor.
A reader recently emailed me asking for some advice. He has suffered from a stroke and lost use of a couple of his fingers in his left hand. I’ve got his original email and my response response (with some editing to make more sense in a blog format and fixed typos).
Here is the original email:
Hello Sam. I dont know if you or anyone can advise me. Earlier in my life.
I recently received a message from someone lamenting that they felt like they hadn’t improved much over the last thirty years. We had a bit of a back and forth and hopefully he’s got a path to improve. The conversation was one I could imagine a lot of guitarists benefitting from, so I’ve put it out here.
I started off asking a few questions:
What do you want to be able to do on guitar?
A former student recently emailed me with the following question:
Hey Sam,
In one month we´ll be playing the final concert for this semester. We´re doing one song that has a rather tricky Intro Riff.
The target BPM for the riff are about 90 to 93. I can play it reliably at about 80 Bpm. That means at 80bpm I´m not making any mistakes. As soon as I crank it up to the target speed I´m starting to struggle and mistakes start to occur.
This is a backing track in E minor, with drums, strings and bass.
String Arrangement The track has strings, drums and bass guitar. The guitar fills quite a low register, so to make room for improvisation, I placed the strings quite high up.
The bass guitar is playing a single E note, with the strings filling out the e minor harmony, with violins I & II playing octaves, moving between the E and D note, to create an E minor 7 feel: