The thread's not dead!

I think we've all learned a lot here this week. Scott - thanks so much for the inspiration and getting so many of us involved.

Nick - your post is somewhat incoherent. I'm not sure I understand what you mean. These challenges aren't about trying to do something impossible. They seem - to me, at least - to be about doing something perfectly possible, at each individual's particular level. And then measuring progress over time. There's no competition. I'm one of the slower players on here. Big deal. Doesn't bother me at all. I'm still very happy to participate.

Instead of posting semi-coherent ramblings, why not take the trouble to try one of the challenges. I'm pretty sure you'll gain an awful lot of respect on here by doing so, no matter what speed you're at.

C'mon Nick - let's see you have a go at one of these. It only takes 10 mins to record.

Hmm... the log-in captcha just now was 'psyo'. Should I read anything into this?

Anyway, I didn't get nearly as much time to practice this week as I normally do. But when I did, I played everything with upstrokes. Result? Surprisingly big improvement. I think a week ago I was scraping 64bpm. Here it is at 76bpm:



Bad news is my alternate picking sucks. I used to be able to hit 140-150 (even 160 once!) with 4s, but here with 8s I can't even do 64. I guess that's what happens if you don't keep the practice up.

And here's my attempt. This is at 65bpm. I was quite surprised to find how much harder the upstrokes are:

Hey John,

I don't think I can advise myself, but it might be helpful to know what size venue you're going to be playing in.

Thanks for listening fellas!

Scott - you've been such an enormous help and encouragement - I really appreciate it. I've always struggled soloing over more up-tempo tracks, but you've given me some confidence (and a vocabulary) to give it a go. I know there are plenty of clangers in there, tedious repetitions etc. But there are a few bits when I listen back and I think 'yeah, that's not too bad.'

Ursin, thanks man. I've been using the same licks over a few different tracks, all in Em. The goal is to do this 25 times. Given that I spend 1-5 attempts on each track, I'm pretty sure I'll be up to the 100 mark before long. So far, these have all been improvised. So the first couple of times I'll try some ideas, and by the time I record I have some notion of which ideas seem to work better than others. Even then, it's still very much off-the-cuff, so I can't repeat it exactly. With this particular backing track, it was really my first try. From now on I'm going to try a bit of a more structured approach and try and refine each idea measure-by-measure.

Sorry - obscure reference. He was a cooking hero of mine when I lived in the UK. I moved to San Francisco for work, and found myself very close to both him and the Mesa Boogie factory :).

Emulsion! I meant emulsion, not suspension. May Thomas Keller forgive me.

Oh wow. Thanks for posting that! Looks like I need to revisit all this...

I disagree. It's important to get a good picking technique (sarod is probably not the best one to start with) and a good left hand technique (yep, trills are a very important part of this). But I think learning something like the pentatonic scale and having fun with it while jamming is very important too. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy: in my opinion the goal is making music, not learning technique for technique's sake.