Aris's Thread, for Gab's Army Options

[Gabriel Leopardi]

Hi Aris! Welcome to your thread for Gab's Army as we agreed via PM!

Here I will copy all the info that you've gave me about you because it will help me as a reference to start working.


"At first your style lessons came to my attention while I was looking to decode some of the techniques of my favorite bands so I can use it in my own compositions. At first I really liked the skate punk lesson although I don't listen to the style so often but it felt that the parts you composed are capturing the best of it. I was also very glad that you put up social distortion and the stooges (the latter was the least expected and I m glad you find it worthwhile even if it maybe too easy for your playing).

Lately I have watched a couple of your video lessons on soloing techniques and improvisation and tried practicing some of the materials on scales and patterns.

I would like you to be my mentor in my musical journey. My experience should be on a basic level. I am also familiar with minor/major scales but not fluent. I have also had four live performances with my band at small nights.
Since I am already 33 years old + full time job + kids, my time to practice is limited. However, I have decided to make a consistent effort to pursue this dream of mine and spend about an hour every day practicing. Due to this goal I mostly play guitar while practicing instead of learning covers. I understand I have to improve my technique, speed and accuracy before I can play the songs I like with confidence and come up with fresh ideas.

I believe you would make an ideal instructor for me since you definitely have the knowledge, technique and you are also very familiar with the styles that I am mostly interested in. I am only mentioning styles because I won't have enough time to start with classical music and end up where I would like to be smile.gif

To give you an idea, some of my key goals are:

- to be able to play guitar with confidence
- to be able to improvise
- to create tunes based on my personal ideas and musical styles of interest
* BUT you know better what it takes to do all this and more."


You goals are very clear and define our next steps. I would like to invite you to share here some audio and video of you playing to let me see your current level, your strong and weak points.

You are at GuitarMasterClass.net

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[Gabriel Leopardi]

Hi Aris, this is a very valuable analysis of your diary work.

It made me think on something that I think it's an interesting thing. Every time I say to a person, you have to practice between 1 and 3 hours per day to become a better guitarist. They think, oh that's a lot! But the curious thing is that if you have a well organized routine, covering the important aspects, and divide your time to practice each one, you start to feel that 1 hour is the minimum that you need. You finally have to dedicate 15 minutes to each thing and while you practice you notice that you need more for it. This is something that happens to me even when I create 3 hours routines, so I think that the more focused we are, the more time we will want to practice each topic.

My recommendation to your time issue is to be a bit ore flexible with the routine. If one day, you are more inspired to practice AP, you can let one of the techniques for the following day, but at least dedicate 5 minutes to the other technique just to make you muscles keep on feeling familiar with the motions. The main goal is always keep on motivation at the top level so I think that the best is to be enough flexible to keep it flowing.

About your recordings, it's ok if you want to dedicate some more time before you share stuff just to play the whole thing, but remember that I'm here to help you so maybe just sharing a short fragment can make me discover something that can be fixed to make your practice more effective. As this is not a face to face course, we need to use technology to stay closer and connected.

The phrase "week" and the number are added just to identify each routine, but most of the times it can take more time to master the lessons of each one. Your comment made me think that maybe I should use another terminology to identify routines... I will think on it. Thanks for the inspiration.

Ok friend, keep on the hard work and please updating me here.

You are at GuitarMasterClass.net

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[Aris]

Hi Gabriel,

Thank you for your advise.
I prepared some stuff to show you regarding my routine so I send them with this message.

I feel that out of all the routine, only alternate picking seems to be feasible for me right now (even with lower speed). However I surely make some progress in all of the stuff even if it is successfully switching from one chord to only one other chord.

Some small insight on the videos I sent today:

- warm up - picking arpeggios: I originally had much difficulty to switch from the first chord to the second one. Now at day 5, I seem to manage better. What still seems impossible is stretching my hands to reach chord 3 and even worse chord 4 as you could tell from the video.

- alternate picking: this seems possible (i m not sure about speed yet) if I manage to remember the queue of all the notes while playing. I will need to play on this a little more time to get familiar with it. I'm currently playing at 160bpm which for the moment gives me time to think what comes next.

- phrasing: I'm not sure about the timing here. I try to imitate the lesson but this is very subjective. I find my self waiting to hear the note play from the lesson so that I will follow. If I try to play on my own over metronome then I m not sure where to start each phrase. I will focus some more on the details and perhaps set a few checkpoints.

- rhythm: The only problem at slow speed (140bpm) is hitting the lower strings when I change from the first G chord to the D chord. I tend to miss the lower strings since my right hand naturally follows the pointing finger of the left hand (which is placed at string 3 for D chord) and the right hand strikes the higher strings mistakenly.

- improvization: This really hurts!... I hope you won't kill yourself from boredom. [Caution: You might have a nervous laugh ]. I hope tonight the patterns and arpeggios will be more connected in my mind eventually. So I will hopefully have something better to show very soon. At this point I feel that each chord in the backing track is played for very short time for me to have time to play the scale/arpeggio for each chord. Maybe I shouldn't try to play a lot of notes.
I also tend to play over each chord starting from the same couple of notes which does not give me room for interesting variations.

You are at GuitarMasterClass.net

Don't miss today's free lick. Plus all our lessons are packed with free content!

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This post has been edited by Aris: Oct 14 2014, 12:33 PM