Friday, February 25, 2011

Lesson #3: Flattop's Revenge

Rather than recapping the lesson, I'm just going to hit the highlights.

We went over the C Major scale in first position. There's going to be some memorization involved there, as I'm supposed to learn the pattern and the names of the notes as I'm playing them. I think this will be a good exercise for getting to know the fretboard better. As it is, I know a few of the important markers to find my way around with a little thought, but it'd be awfully nice to get rid of that extra "thought" step.

We did a play through of Killing Floor, which was one of last week's songs. It's a really fun 12 bar blues kind of line, and I really enjoyed playing through it a few times while my teacher played the guitar part. I think my appetite has been wet for playing with other people. It was way more fun than playing along with recordings has been.

This week's new songs to learn are Come Together by the Beatles and the line from Groove is in the Heart by Dee Lite. It's originally a Herbie Hancock line from a late 60's soundtrack, but I think I'll always hear it as the Dee Lite song.

Come Together is pretty easy so far, but I still have a lot of practicing to do to always fret notes cleanly all the way through the riff. It's a personal failing that I tend to get something to 75% and then move on before mastering it. I'm going to try to focus on avoiding that and not getting too spread out.

I've got a "song list" from bass lessons of five songs now, as well as a few more that I've been trying on my own. I need to make sure I'm still going back and playing those other songs completely and improving instead of just focusing on this week's new work. It's not as fun as learning new stuff, but I know myself well enough to know that putting in extra work to get those older songs up to 85% or 90% is going to pay off.

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