Bread We Break

Bread We Break is a worship and communion event for young adults across Winnipeg which has grown in the last couple years to be a pretty big deal. My older brother is the lead guitarist for the Bread We Break band, but he can't make it to the next one, so, long story short, I'm playing lead guitar for the upcoming Bread We Break. This a great opportunity to connect my project to my faith, and I am sure that I would not have been equipped to play the event before this project.

A Few Video Lessons I Found Useful

This lesson talks about the idea of using "blocks" when soloing. What that means is that basically there are pieces of the scale you are using every 4-5 frets that have a particular sound (because of the part of the scale they include). These "blocks" can be quite useful especially to kind of fall back on when lost.

This was just fun to learn.

Midnight in Harlem

It would be hopeless to try and learn every note of the solo in this song, but I jam to it a lot, and know bits and pieces here and there. This song borders on musical perfection in my opinion and has been a major inspiration for this project.

Gravity

About a year ago my mentor for this project briefly taught me the opening line to this song, but I kind of forgot about it until recently. When I heard this live version I was blown away and started learning more than just the intro and since then it's become one of my favourite songs to play. I still can't play much of the second solo because it gets pretty ridiculous.

What I've Learned from Dereck Trucks

I happened to be introduced to Dereck Trucks by my mentor for this project about a year ago while we were working on building our guitars. Since then he has become maybe my second favourite guitarist and has really inspired me to be able to solo. Few people can express so much emotion through an electric guitar, and that is something I aspire to be able to do even just a little bit. The way I see it, there's not much other reason to even play a guitar, or any instrument period. He has said himself that he cares a lot more about moving people than he does about showing them what he can do with his fingers, and it shows. Although he primarily uses a slide in his soloing, there are definitely a few things I can learn from him even when not using a slide. The biggest thing I take from his solos is difficult to explain but I will try. He has a way of forming a phrase, or a "lick" if you want to call it, and really establishing those few notes as the basis for his solo. He then plays around those notes, and always comes back to some form of them. His little spurts around the base often get longer and longer, and reach higher and higher, but they always come back to the original "lick". This seems to give the solo a theme, and seems to be his way of really saying something through a solo. The other thing I've learned from him is that even though he uses the slide to play a lot of notes that you can barely hear, no note is wasted. He never plays a note for the sake of playing another note, if that makes sense. One thing that bothers me about a lot of guitarists is that they seem to just play as many notes as they possibly can and call that a good solo. Dereck Trucks, however, never does this. Each note adds to the feeling of the solo, and is another carefully chosen word in what he is trying to say. This fascinates me. It's also difficult to practice because it's very unspecific, but what I've tried to do is pick a simple lick from one of his solos, and then play around with it, changing maybe one or two notes each time, but make sure each note added is purposeful. The final thing that I didn't originally learn from Trucks, but that he has probably influenced me to do more is not using a pick. I find that there are so many more dynamic ranges that you can get without a pick, and I generally just hate the tone of picks. You feel a lot more part of the guitar when you use your fingers, and I like that.

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. 

Welcome to My Blog

This blog is for a school project where I basically get to do whatever I want for 20% of the time. I chose to become better at guitar. More specifically, I want to learn more theory, and do some of the types of exercises I would be doing if I took lessons. Ultimately, I want to be a better soloist by learning  why I'm hitting the notes I'm hitting when I solo. I'll be going about this by watching video lessons, studying theory, listening and playing along to songs, taking in tips from guitarist friends, and actually learning new songs. So I'll be posting my progress, the things I'm learning, and other related things on this blog.