I would love to join this Technique Challenge. Coincidentally, I am in Module 10 of b2b and I have struggled with the stretch to play the riff from London’s Calling. I notice that this challenge is focussed on the same area of the fretboard and it would probably help me. I have arthritic fingers so stretches are often a challenge. Micro-shift I hear you cry, and yes I am attempting that approach but the speed of shifting required in that riff is super fast and the ability to hold down the string at fret 7 and just quickly fret 10 with the pinky is such a cool skill, so thanks to the miracle of paracetamol - I am not giving up on stretching just yet.
I have printed and analysed the tab & stave for this exercise and I can see that we are playing the major and minor triads for each of the chords, with mostly the classic but also some alternative fingerings.
I will post my first video later today. Thanks to everyone in this chat for inspiring me to have the courage to have a go, especially @beerbaron and @Vader .
I would just caution against putting a hard deadline on yourself if you don’t have to. Some lessons and modules will go really quick. But definitely don’t be afraid of redoing some or spend more time on some. The course is a buy once, cry once thing so you aren’t on some deadline before re-upping a subscription or something and you can do it as many times as you want.
So as I’m working through this, the place I always seem to mess up is on the fourth beat of the fourth measure. I get to that point and I always want to play an E. I get that far just fine, then i go F-A-C-E, I know it’s not right and it throws me off until about halfway through the triad on the A.
Yeah I totally get it- I’m actually having to slow myself down a bit because I can feel the blisters coming. That date is my 55th, so I kind of just set an arbitrary goal when I started the other day.
The problem is that the course is so engaging that I find myself looking forward to doing more lessons. Maybe Billie Jean and this challenge will crush my spirit. We’ll see!
Just watched the video again to remind myself of all the things to pay attention to for the different levels and wondered if it would be helpful to say something about muting as well with all those string crossings. I’m definitely getting noises from strings that I don’t want .
I’ve been watching eagle eyed where you’re putting your thumb in the video and it looks like for the earlier/one note per beat levels you even move it onto the E string during the second chord but for the faster version it goes on the E string later. What else is going on muting wise?
I have enjoyed this but it is way harder than I expected. Firstly, I have never recorded myself, which is long overdue, so if all this exercise does is introduce me to that, that would great. The downside is, now that I have recorded myself its driven me to drink. I am sitting here at 2pm with a glass of wine. When I first attempted it I simply could not get the sequence of notes into my head. Prior to this I have only been playing short repeating riffs, like London Calling. After failing at this for a day or more, I decided to try something I learned from a book I read years ago called “Teaching Your Baby to Read”. The first principle is to go LARGE. A baby can read a word like MUMMY if it is printed in red letters 3 inches tall. So instead of TAB, I drew shapes representing the three notes of each phrase and printed them on 4 sheets of A4 to spread in front of so that I could see them clearly while learning to get the notes under my fingers. See photo.
Next I tried playing with the backing track provided. Ouch! Way too fast for me. Could not work out how to slow it down so I decided to get a metronome. I can sort of attempt it at 100bpm but hit a block when I realised my phone cannot record me and play the metronome. So I now have a new web-based metronome on my desktop PC.
I have spent WAY too long desperately trying to practice this so I can play the piece 6 times round at the slow tempo. At this point I can no longer even play the C major scale, . Hence the booze. I will return to this exercise tomorrow maybe. Hope you are all having fun and making progress.
Thanks everyone for your comments so far! And don’t feel bad if something is too hard, it’s helpful for me to hear! I will likely modify the exercise a bit and add an easier level 1/2/etc based on what I’ve heard so far before this gets to Youtube.
I’d say my biggest suggestion would be that the 132 BPM is pretty fast as a starting point. When this turns into something for the wider world, having a slower track (maybe something in the 75-90 range?) available would really help.
I mean, when I first saw this my thought was “Quarter notes at 132? That’s nothing.” Then I tried it and…well…you can see my before video up above. I wonder how many people might try this at that 132, fail pretty bad at it on the first couple tries and then never come back to it. I’ve been working on it for a couple weeks and I can do the 132 pretty well (if you ignore the raking in my plucking hand), but if I had come across this on YT without the “before/after” of the challenge, I probably would have bounced off it pretty hard.
On the plus side, this is definitely strengthening my ring finger on my fretting hand. That is probably my weakest finger. I would go out of my way to avoid using it. Now I find myself a little more open to using it on some things.
I felt bad that I’d been enjoying this challenge but hadn’t made the effort to comment or post videos. So here goes. Day 1 video - sorry about the annoying metronome (at 70) which is the only way I had a chance of doing it then.
Then I’ve been doing my homework every day and i thought I was doing fine and getting all the alternating perfect. Anyway here’s the progress. I obviously still of lots of work to do on plucking. I also am struggling with the ringing other strings that several others have mentioned. Particularly when i reach the pinky to hit the last note of the second bar (D) it hits the G string and it rings. Other places where this happens too. My hands are quite small which doesn’t help. Anyway onward!
That’s already a lot better. I’ve been doing it also. For the ringing notes, I’ve had the most success doing the sneaky finger muting technique with my ring and pinky fingers on my plucking hand, as well as moving my thumb to the E string when it’s not used anymore.
Several weeks in and I’ve only just realised (in a ridiculouly exciting aha moment) that it’s the diatonic chords of the C major scale. Should have read your comment more closely!
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. Hence the booze. I will return to this exercise tomorrow maybe. Hope you are all having fun and making progress.
