Interval Review:

There were 37 cards to review. It took a long time and I started to become overwhelmed, but nobody said it's gonna be easy! These A string - B string intervals are the thing that I'm least familiar with. This will take some time for my brain to incorporate.


Warm-up/Technique:

Finger-stretching exercise - 1st position

String Walking exercise (Pumping Nylon pg. 37) with i,m eight @ 105 bpm
String Walking exercise with m, l with eight notes @ 70 bpm
String-Jumping 1st string to 5th string, 2nd string to 6th string @ 68 bpm (same descending)

Right-Hand Velocity (pg. 63) with sixteenth notes @ 107 bpm rest & free.
l, m @88 bpm rest & free

Synchronization Exercise (Pumping Nylon pg. 65) with i,m sixteenth notes 93 bpm

l, m @ 80 bpm.

Putting it all together p. 67 Exercise - steady @ 86 bpm both i,m and l, m
@ 89 i, m only

Scale Rhythmic Variation p. 68 @ 88 bpm

Speed Burst pg. 69 Exercise 1.A @ 70 bpm
Played quarter notes at @ 65 bpm in order to prepare for this exercise. Much better than yesterday.

Percussive Exercise
Played Nothin on You rhythm @ 81 bpm

Thoughts:
Went to the Portland Guitar Society meeting yesterday for the first time. So many guitar enthusiasts! And most wanted to play. I came just as the meeting had started and put my name up on the open mike. I was number 23 or so. So I sat through all the performances, and some of them were stellar. I got myself really worked up, to the point that I was kind of hoping that I they'd run out of time for me. Which they did. I felt a bit overwhelmed by the music, because I inevitably started comparing my abilities to those of the players I saw. And it wasn't too positive in my favor.

But today, playing Estrellia, I decided to just enjoy the piece, and thereby reminded myself that this is how music should be played. I just have to play pieces that are accessible to me and have fun doing it. Magnificent chops do not guarantee musicianship.

Repertoire:

Estrellita
Just enjoyed playing the piece and really let is shine. Of course the mic wasn't on...

Pica-Pica
Same pleasant vibe as Estrellita. Just concentrated on conveying the story of the piece.

Na Gafieira Do Vidigal
Hmm, going through the last part before the melody, contrary to what I wrote yesterday, seems like the rhythm just keeps repeating itself. Maybe I'm not listening closely enough. Time should show.

In any case, I can play this part at 80% of target speed.

Samba Caribe
Bart A measure 12-13 arpeggio - did yesterday's wrist shifting with open strings @ 65 bpm. Getting better. I must not rush this for the sake of just trying to play this piece at full speed. Truthfully, it's a long way off from that, but with persistent effort, it'll get there.

Part B measures 14-15 - also getting better.

Interval Review:

Reviewed intervals from yesterday. Added B string - A string descending intervals.

How will I study the triads once I get to them? Should I study the intervals first? Should I study them in one position based on a scale?

First, I'll need to study how the 1st and 2nd inversion triads look on a staff so that I'm able to identify them immediately. Simultaneously, I can go by Jody Fischer's Beginning Jazz Guitar book to study first all of the root triads, then all of the 1st inversion triads, then all of the 2nd inversion triads. After I get that down, I can start studying all of the triad possibilities in one position for every scale.


Warm-up/Technique:

Finger-stretching exercise - 1st position

String Walking exercise (Pumping Nylon pg. 37) with i,m eight @ 103 bpm
String Walking exercise with m, l with eight notes @ 65 bpm. Decreased from 65 because I really wanted to nail the notes perfectly

Made up a little lick - I would never (up to now) play this while improvising because I avoid position changes and descending lines - but those things add color to the music.

String-Jumping 1st string to 5th string, 2nd string to 6th string @ 68 bpm (same descending)

Right-Hand Velocity (pg. 63) with sixteenth notes @ 107 bpm rest & free.
l, m @85 bpm rest & free

Synchronization Exercise (Pumping Nylon pg. 65) with i,m sixteenth notes -
at yesterday's speed of 89 bpm, the pinky went up too high, lowered to 88

l, m @ 76 bpm.

Putting it all together p. 67 Exercise - steady @ 86 bpm

Scale Rhythmic Variation p. 68 @ 85 bpm

Speed Burst pg. 69 Exercise 1.A @ 70 bpm
This first exercise involves playing with i and a only. As it turns out, this coordination is completely lacking. So I had to just play i - a quarter notes at 65 bpm in order to prepare for this exercise.

Percussive Exercise
Played Nothin on You rhythm @ 81 bpm


Repertoire:

Estrellita & Pica-Pica
Decided to record video with my digital camera. The thing is more imposing than the built-in webcam on my laptop and I got camera shy. That messed up my psyche. When I played Estrellita, I was thinking of how I shouldn't mess up the position jump in measure 9 and how if I do, what does that say about my abilities as a guitarist, since I've been playing this tune for 5 months already......



On Pica-Pica, I didn't feel like my fingers were nimble enough




Na Gafieira Do Vidigal
Wow, this part's blowing me away. Didn't go on from yesterday's, because I noticed new things in there. It's hard man, and BP's rhythms are as complex as Monk's.





I was hoping that it would stay like this until the pretty part, but he keeps switching it up for the remaining 9 measures until the melody. I started to feel a bit overwhelmed, but I'm gonna just take it slowly. No point in learning the next crazy rhythms he has, because my brain won't remember them right now. As it is, I probably should review this in 2 hours to make sure that I haven't forgot it.

Samba Caribe
Bart A measure 12-13 arpeggio to chord - still making mistakes. Played with metronome at 65 bpm, but did so on autopilot (Klickstein warns against this - he said something along the lines of every exercise must have meaning, it must not be mundane)

Analyzed it a bit more. Played the same rhythms on open strings. The problem is that the free stroke run on the High E and B strings then changes to an arpeggio on the A - B strings. The wrist must shift down in order to get the arpeggio clean. It seems that this is the motion that I haven't been getting.

Part B measures 14-15 is also not as easy as I thought. The problem here is easier to identify. The chord in measure 15 must be nailed from a position jump 5 frets away. But the placement of the fingers is quite unusual, and the muscles simply aren't used to the stretching. So I need to just practice the change slowly, making sure that the fingers are already in place in their correct position before I hit the chord.

Interval Review:

Reviewed intervals from yesterday. A string - B string intervals are totally foreign to me, so I failed the reviews of those cards from yesterday.


Warm-up/Technique:

Finger-stretching exercise - 1st position

String Walking exercise (Pumping Nylon pg. 37) with i,m eight @ 100 bpm
String Walking exercise with m, l with eight notes @ 65 bpm. Decreased from 75 because I really wanted to nail the notes perfectly

Made up a little lick - I would never (up to now) play this while improvising because I avoid position changes and descending lines - but those things add color to the music.

Here's a vid:




String-Jumping 1st string to 5th string, 2nd string to 6th string @ 65 bpm (same descending)

Right-Hand Velocity (pg. 63) with sixteenth notes @ 107 bpm rest & free.
l, m @85 bpm rest & free

Synchronization Exercise (Pumping Nylon pg. 65) with i,m sixteenth notes -
at yesterday's speed of 89 bpm, the pinky went up too high, lowered to 86

l, m @ 76 bpm.

Putting it all together p. 67 Exercise - @ 90 bpm - rhythm wasn't perfect, so took it down to 85 bpm and tried my best to make my beat coincide with metronome (you know it's right when you can't hear the metronome beat)

Scale Rhythmic Variation p. 68 @ 85 bpm

Speed Burst pg. 69 Exercise 1.A @ 70 bpm


Repertoire:

Estrellita
Check it out.
Got myself worked up and quite nervous, so made a couple of errors. Was able to recover in Part C, but still made a mistake. Good lessons in performing:



Pica Pica



Na Gafieira Do Vidigal
Went onwards - Baden Powell's (BP) busting out crazy, subtle, barely audible rhythms here with artificial harmonics. I'm bound to forget this by tomorrow



Samba Caribe
Bart A measure 12-13 arpeggio to chord - still hard. Messed it up in recording.

Part B measures 12-15 lost confidence - looked at fingerboard

Interval Review:

Reviewed intervals and added too many new cards ! :)
A string - B string ascending and G string to A string descending.


Warm-up/Technique:

Finger-stretching exercise - switched to 1st position, I've been languishing at 5th position for way too long

String Walking exercise (Pumping Nylon pg. 37) with i,m eight @ 100 bpm
String Walking exercise with m, l with eight notes @ 75 bpm

String-Jumping 1st string to 5th string, 2nd string to 6th string @ 65 bpm (same descending)

Right-Hand Velocity (pg. 63) with sixteenth notes @ 105 bpm rest & free.
l, m @80 bpm rest & free

Synchronization Exercise (Pumping Nylon pg. 65) with i,m sixteenth notes -
89 bpm

l, m @ 73 bpm.

Putting it all together p. 67 Exercise - @ 90 bpm

Scale Rhythmic Variation p. 68 @ 90 bpm

Speed Burst pg. 69 Exercise 1.A @ 70 bpm


Repertoire:

Pica Pica
Played @ 85 bpm, but double-timed the second repetition of Part B. That relaxed me and the melody flowed.

Also, noticed that it's difficult to nail chord in the 1st ending of Part A (ater measures 16). Practiced this slowly.

Estrellita
I rocked it sitting down and being relaxed. A couple of errors here and there but able to carry the piece.

Na Gafieira Do Vidigal
Reviewed yesterday's and ventured into the African-themed jam section of Part D that precedes the sweet, sweet, MELLIFLUOUS (bam!) melody

Samba Caribe
Bart A measure 12-13 arpeggio to chord - getting better @ 63

Part B measures 12-13 chord jump - noticeably better. Played @ 65.

Part B measures 14 - 15 chord jump is difficult - fingers and brain aren't used to it yet

Interval Review:

Reviewed intervals and added 5th string - 3rd string intervals.

Sight-Reading:
Decided that I may get overwhelmed if I start memorizing both the triad structures and the intervals (they're somewhat in different categories, because I'm studying ALL the intervals now

Warm-up/Technique:

Finger-stretching exercise - switched to 1st position, I've been languishing at 5th position for way too long

String Walking exercise (Pumping Nylon pg. 37) with i,m eight @ 100 bpm
String Walking exercise with m, l with eight notes @ 75 bpm
I filed my nails. Didn't seem like I overdid it, but it's harder to play, especially rest stroke

String-Jumping 1st string to 5th string, 2nd string to 6th string @ 50 bpm

Right-Hand Velocity (pg. 63) with sixteenth notes @ 105 bpm rest & free.
l, m @ 75 bpm rest & free

Synchronization Exercise (Pumping Nylon pg. 65) with i,m sixteenth notes -
85 bpm

l, m @ 70 bpm.

Putting it all together p. 67 Exercise - Crossing the strings is actually much harder than it seems. Had to take it down to 90 bpm and practice those parts exclusively

Scale Rhythmic Variation p. 68 @ 78 bpm


Repertoire:

Pica Pica
Played @ 85 bpm, but double-timed the second repetition of Part B. That relaxed me and the melody flowed.

Also, noticed that it's difficult to nail chord in the 1st ending of Part A (ater measures 16). Practiced this slowly.

Estrellita
Still not confident enough about the position jump in measures 9-10. I suppose I just need to keep hacking away.

Na Gafieira Do Vidigal
Recorded myself and compared to original recording. As I thought, there were nuances that I had missed, etc. Too complex to get into all the details, suffice it to say that there are a lot of nuances there. Didn't go on to next section, because felt like I'd overload my brain with new info.

Here's the vid:





Samba Caribe
I started to practice the jump Part B measures 12-13 chord jump after I woke up in the morning. Naturally, this is where the insightful stuff comes. I realized that the pinky stays in the same position in both chords and that I've been ignoring this opportunity for economy of movement.

Bart A measure 12-13 arpeggio to chord - still difficult at 60. Referred to Gerald Klickstein's section about problem-solving. Some ideas I tried out:
1. Playing the section backwards
2. Modifying the rate of change
This allowed me to see that there's a left and right hand problem. In LH, the pinky needs to be stretched in order to gain the most economy of movement, but pinky-stretching in the first position is quite difficult.

Thoughts:
So one of the reasons I decided to focus on leaning the intervals between strings through Anki (the spaced-repetition software) was that it is the first step to understanding chords. I want to understand chords because a lot of complex chords that sound pretty are used in samba/bossa (and actually in all styles, nowadays), and also because I want to sight-read on guitar.

The sight-reading goal is a running theme in this whole endeavor. I don't want to be the player messing up my body position because I need to look at the guitar neck while playing. The guitar is a real instrument! It matters how you hold the guitar. Not for aesthetic reasons, but because it influences your body, and thereby your sound.

Real instruments can be used to sight-read music. And there's plenty of it out there, so why not capitalize on that. Some jazz cats weren't into sight-reading music. But I bet just as many could do it and earned a living like that. Rock and punk and all that came around and made it uncool to sight-read. "Just be spontaneous." The outcome of that has been a very monotonous guitar sound - some of it is great, but there's a lot missing.

Usually, the guitar books ask you to memorize chord structures all at once. For example, they'll give you a Maj7 chord and just ask you to remember all of the scale degrees.

Sure, that's fine for the most common chords (even I managed to memorize the basic 4-note chords like this). But it doesn't work (for me, at least) for the more complex chords as well as for the inversions. After years of uncertainty on this subject, I came back to it and it was clear that the reason all of these chords get jumbled up in my brain is because, fundamentally, I''m unfamiliar with the underlying intervals among the notes in the chords.

Now that I'm been pounding away at these intervals, I need to tie it in back to the chords. So I need to first sight-read common intervals all over the neck. After I get that down, I need to start sightreading simple chords. Let's see how my brain takes that challenge.

Interval Review:

Reviewed intervals that have piled up.

Sight-Reading:
Reviewed lower notes (drop D, low E, F) on the staff using Notes in Flash program on the web.

Re-started Leavitt's sight-reading book from the beginning.

So, I thought about a gameplan for learning chord sightreading. First, I need to familiarize myself with all of the intervals. Then, I need to familiarize myself with the shapes of all of the regular triads (including inversions). That serves as the base for chords. But, how would I play chords that are more complex and have accidentals, etc? (The stuff that makes music pretty)

To answer this, I thought about how a piano player sight-reads (well, first I tried to just find the answer on the classical guitar forum, but to no avail). I think that they become familiar with the shapes of common chords and don't go through the process determining which notes are actually in the chord. Then, if they encounter a chord with something strange, they just manually go through the mental process of adding that note to the triad that they automatically know. I'm assuming that with one or two extra notes, this mental exercise doesn't take up too much time.

Now, getting back to playing a simple triad, how would one know that they should be playing a minor chord instead of a major chord? On sheet music, the notes for D major and D minor will look the same.

That, my friends, is where the importance of key signatures comes in. In fact, this particular situation is probably one where key signatures are the most useful. If I'm familiar with the key indicated by the key signatures, then I automatically know that since I see no accidentals, the D triad is a major triad since I see C# and F# in the key signature.

No wonder I have an Anki deck for the key signatures (last review - 11 months ago..... :). So, besides reviewing the key signatures, I must learn how all the triads look (it's funny, I've done this in the past in Jody Fischer Beginning Jazz Guitar book).

Warm-up/Technique:

Finger-stretching exercise @ 100 bpm

String Walking exercise (Pumping Nylon pg. 37) with i,m eight @ 100 bpm
String Walking exercise with m, l with eight notes @ 75 bpm
String-Jumping 1st string to 5th string, 2nd string to 6th string @ 70 bpm (played the etude, too -- confidence is King!)

Right-Hand Velocity (pg. 63) with sixteenth notes @ 105 bpm rest & free.
l, m @ 75 bpm rest & free

Synchronization Exercise (Pumping Nylon pg. 65) with i,m sixteenth notes -
85 bpm

l, m @ 70 bpm.

Putting it all together p. 67 Exercise - @ 100 bpm


Repertoire:

Pica Pica
Played @ 85 bpm, but double-timed the second repetition of Part B. That relaxed me and the melody flowed.

Estrellita
Played once through.

Na Gafieira Do Vidigal
Getting more smooth. A couple of good runs and I can proceed to transcribe the next section.

Transition between last measure of Part B and 1st measure of Part C is not smooth - there's a position change that I keep messing up. It's wonderful that I get to practice position changes within the context of a fun tune like this, as opposed to just drilling. Obviously, I have to get this down so that I have confidence and am not worrying about nailing it.

I need to record myself playing this part so far, because I have the feeling that I'm missing a lot of the nuances that make Baden Powell unique. I get a feeling that I may just be hacking through the piece. On the other hand, there's not point in imitating all of him......still

Samba Caribe
Part A - jump between measures 12-13 is quite hard. Practiced at 60 bpm.

Bart B measure 7 chord jump - still difficult. Keep at it.

Interval Review:

Yesterday added descending 4th string - 5th string intervals.

Warm-up/Technique:

Finger-stretching exercise @ 100 bpm

String Walking exercise (Pumping Nylon pg. 37) with i,m eight @ 95 bpm
String Walking exercise with m, l with eight notes @ 75 bpm
l finger is numb for some reason - psychological perhaps, I'm feeling a bit at a loss as to how to continue with my overall guitar endeavor

String-Jumping 1st string to 5th string, 2nd string to 6th string @ 74 bpm (used in the little position jump etude I made up

Right-Hand Velocity (pg. 63) with sixteenth notes @ 105 bpm rest & free.
l, m @ 75 bpm rest & free


Synchronization Exercise (Pumping Nylon pg. 65) with i,m sixteenth notes -
85 bpm


Repertoire:

Pica-Pica
Played measure 13 at 85 bpm.

Na Gafieira Do Vidigal
Part D first two measures.

Samba Caribe
Part A - jump between measures 12-13 at 60 bpm. Focused on only the right hand - the difficulty is switching the wrist position just slightly from playing a one-line lick on the high E string to playing a chord on the 2nd-5th strings. It's funny, this part's becoming more difficult the more I delve into it. Ah, the subtleties of the guitar.

Bart B measure 7 chord jump - practiced @ 65 bpm.