Update...Finally

I haven't blogged on my progress at all, so I'll try and get you up to date on some of what I've been doing in one post.

I've been playing a lot, even more than I already used to, because I'm really loving some of the new stuff I'm learning because of this project. My love for guitar accelerates as I learn and play more. Most of what I've been doing has been learning songs (mostly by ear, but every once in a while I cheat and watch a youtube tutorial). I try and learn harder songs each time, and I always pick a song that I love because it drives me to get better and better at it so it sounds good when I play it. Right now, I'm super in to John Mayer. A lot of his songs really push me because they often have a seemingly simple lick, but once I learn the notes I realize that something about the way he plays the notes makes it really tricky to make it sound good. Whether it's which notes he bends up to, or which notes he accents, he always has a new trick up his sleeve, and I've been trying to catch on. So far, the songs I've spent the most time on have been Gravity, Slow Dancing In A Burning Room, and Hear Of Life (all by John Mayer). Hopefully in the future I'll move on to figuring out some Jack White stuff...

In class I have been watching lots of video lessons from guitarlessons.com (see "resources" page). I have mostly focused on the theory videos, and I have learned about things I had never even heard of. For example, the Mixolydian guitar "mode". All this strange word means is that when playing in the Mixolydian mode, you lower the seventh note of the key you are playing in's major scale. So if you were playing in A major, the seventh note is usually a G#, but when playing in the Mixolydian mode, you always play a G natural instead. There are a bunch of other "modes" with weird names that involve lowering different scale degrees or other slight changes to give each mode a unique sound. One of the most important things I've been learning from this site is that you can learn how to solo just by using the notes of a scale and remaining in the scale shape you know. You don't have to be able to fly all over the fretboard to start soloing. I've already always been a fan of people who can play a great solo using just a few notes.

One of my goals for this project was to memorize all the notes on every fret and every string. I realized quickly that I already had the top three strings memorized from playing bass, and the top string is just another E string so all the notes are the same as the low E string so I know that one too. Really all I'm left with is the G and B string. Even though this should make my job way easier, I've been having trouble getting myself to actually memorizing them. I notice that when playing guitar, I tend to care less about what the note is called, and more about where it fits in to the scale I'm using (is it the 3rd, the 5th, etc.). I'm starting to wonder if it's worth it to devote my time to memorizing the names of all the frets and instead focusing more on what frets on what strings I can play in any given key. I figure eventually knowing what notes those are will fall into place because I'll know what notes are in each scale.