View Single Post
  #21  
Old 09-15-2017, 10:26 PM
TBman's Avatar
TBman TBman is offline
Charter Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: New Jersey
Posts: 35,829
Default

The very first thing I do is sit down with the tab in front of me and listen to the original and read along with the music without a guitar on my lap.

Many of the songs I attempt to play are over my head (too fast) so I have to take it one measure at a time, find where everything is, play it over and over to build muscle memory and try to keep the correct note duration adjusted for the speed I'm learning at. A lot of times is just a matter of playing the song a lot over time and it falls into place eventually. Sometimes I will have to do a study guide of sorts of pieces of the song and put it into guitar pro and throw repeat starts and stops around the measures and just repeat until my fingers fall off.

Other times I will put the whole song into GuitarPro and play along first very slowly and then bring it up over time. The difficult part for me is having the patience not to go too fast just to play along with the mp3 of the song. Going too fast too soon just teaches you how to make fast mistakes. So I'll bring a tune from 80 to 150 bpm over time, but the work to bring it to the final 170 takes longer than that initial 80 to 150. What I like to do is go right back to 130 bpm and practice it over and over slowly to reinforce it and then work it to the 170. Right now I have a few songs at that stage where I can do them at 150ish, but the quality degrades bringing the tune to 170+ bpm for the whole thing. This whole process for a tune is long term. These tunes that I do are a constant work in progress

I like to be able to play a whole tune through slowly and then bring the whole thing up to speed as opposed to learning one section at a time and bring that to performance speed, then the next, etc.

Just as important to my playing and practicing is just learning tunes that are at or just below my pay grade so that I can entertain myself and it isn't all work. These tunes I can learn to play sometimes in a couple of hours, other times in a couple of sittings. I try to find tunes that are only 1 to 2 pages long, 3 at most. There are a tons of good tunes that I pass over only because they are 4,5 or 6 pages long. These tunes just get boring to me after awhile.
__________________
Barry

Sad Moments {Marianne Vedral cover}:


My SoundCloud page

Some steel strings, some nylon.
Reply With Quote