I picked up my guitar this morning and to be honest I didn’t feel very positive about it. The last couple of days I hadn’t seen any tangible improvement and was feeling slightly negative about it. On reflection, I guess this is an issue when you have a learning tool that’s also a game; when you play a game, your improvement is very visible, whereas if you were just taking lessons, your improvement would be less obvious, but you’d have that guidance that would get you through it. So when you play a game and you don’t improve it’s controller through window time. You can’t do that with a guitar, but it can make you feel less like picking it up and playing again.
So today I went into it in a less than favourable way, but it actually worked out a lot better than I expected.
I was going to give Sweet Mountain River a rest as the song of the week challenge ends on Sundays, and I’d had two days of no improvement and frustration. But as my guitar was still tuned to d standard, I gave it a go. Happily for me I managed to improve my score quite a bit, and for the first time, managed to get at least to a point past the solo without missing a note.
From here, I went into the Guitarcade for a look. Apart from a very brief go at the beginning, I hadn’t looked at it. I went for Ducks Redux – I’d quite enjoyed playing Ducks in the first game and as it’s a game that helps to get you used to fret positions, I found it very useful. A gave this about twenty minutes, and enjoyed it. The guitarcade games I think are a very useful way of getting you through the exercises and techniques that I know personally I find difficult to sustain for longer than a few minutes.
I am trying not to spread myself between too many songs – I want to work at a handful of songs and improve them before I move on. After Day 6s efforts on RU Mine? I didn’t fancy it, so I went back to this weeks song of the week, Spirit of Radio.
It’s difficult. But I got a lot better today. I’ve been getting a strike very early on in the game, just after the initial riff on the e string which has made it difficult going through the rest of the song. I like that little riff, but later on in the game it adds a couple of extra notes on the string above which throws me at full speed. I seem to have cracked the pattern when I’m playing at a slower speed, but not at the song speed. I also have issues with the timings in the song as it changes often. But it’s improving – my last run in this section I managed to avoid the early strike (not sure how) and this set me up well for the rest of the song. I need to go back through riff repeater and look at these two problem sections if I’m ever going to get through it without a strike.
