July 7, 2023

I had an interesting revelation last night that had me rethinking my approach to just picking up the guitar and blasting into a difficult song. Coincidentally, there was an email in my box a couple hours later addressing just such things, and other good thoughts.

I had not played many of my more challenging pieces for a couple weeks, partly brought on by a post on the Forum asking for help with our lesson on Get Together by The Youngbloods. That story was where I started today’s Update, which finally led to a look at the progress of the addition I am making to that lesson.

It also led to last night’s revelation that maybe one should have some warmup exercises at the start of a practice session. As if by magic, I got an email from Max Rich, our longtime friend and master teacher, suggesting the exact thing. I have added a new Forum called “Tips, Tricks & Strategies”, where I invite everybody to post their suggestions. We have started that Forum with Max’s message and plan to add many more soon. And be sure to get on Max’s email list.

About the only playing I did today was snippets of some of the difficult pieces I attempted last night that wore me out, along with examples of a couple good warmups, one for each hand.

And speaking of working on Get Together, I need to re-mention a great tool that helped me out as I was deciphering all the guitar parts involved – the Vidami pedal. It makes looping and replaying parts of videos incredibly efficient by keeping your hands off the computer and on your guitar. Be sure to check it out.

We had one new lesson this week – Mad World by Tears For Fears. As usual, Nesh did a fabulous job breaking down the best way to approach this on an acoustic guitar.

Last thing, and just a heads up – set aside an hour or so on Saturday, July 22 at noon Pacific time if you’d like to join me for an interactive live session. Details will go out in an email around Wednesday of next week.

Till then, stay tuned & in touch,

Neil