Progress Report & Individual Learning Plan Progress (Week 04/11/2024)

Progress Report

This week, we started work on a new original. Our progression was a lot slower this week due to the casting of a new member into the band as well as Levi being off sick.

Nevertheless, we managed to get somewhere and I've posted the structure so far on YouTube. It is not yet completed but I thought it would be useful to record this so both Camryn (vocalist) and Levi (drummer) could figure out some ideas for it before we get back in the rehearsal room - since it's quite hard to communicate in there a lot of the time.

Individual Learning Plan

This is the piece I have chosen to work on this week - Hollywood Woman by Guthrie Govan. It's a great jazz fusion piece with some interesting runs. I've noticed he likes to experiment with large intervals and strange patterns, giving them a cascading feel as they flow up and down the neck.

I spend a lot of time perfecting things before I move on, so I still haven't made it to the very hard parts. It's also harder to fit practice in when I'm sick.

Overall, I feel like this piece is improving not only the speed of my picking, but my ability to relax my right hand and skip strings without issue. For a lot of the passages I had to plan out my picking patterns in advance, for example on the last lick leading with an upstroke after the first three notes - normally I would economy pick everything, but alternate picking this part allowed me to more comfortably transition to the next string when the time came. 

To the left is the next difficult passage of Hollywood Woman, which starts where I left off on the video. There is a lot of movement in the left hand, a combination of hammer-ons/pull-offs and fast picking in the right hand. You may also notice there are muted notes which will be completely new for me - I have only ever used mute notes when playing with my fingers for Mark Knopfler's guitar work, so doing the same with a pick may be a learning curve.

To practice this section, I will be playing along to a metronome and slowly increasing the speed to 120bpm (original tempo) as I have been doing previously.

Apart from learning Hollywood Woman, I'm also getting back into learning the piano because I love the instrument. You can hear some of my playing on the intro to the song we are making (the first video).