Solid practice session today.
I started with chord shapes and transitions. After 10 minutes I recalled a youtube video of Jamie Andreas showing how to strum House of the Rising Sun. After 3 months of playing guitar I have yet to learn any songs. I improvise to blues songs, play along to parts of Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone, and taught myself the intro to Fahey's Sligo River Blues, but everything else is chord and scale practice.
So I stopped playing and brought my classical guitar to the computer room, sat down in an armless chair, and watched Jamie slowly strum House. While that was playing I opened a 2nd window to find the chords to the song. Since I can now play all the popular open chords, learning simple folk songs should not be too rough. I saw that all I had to do was strum Am, C, D, F and E, pretty much in that order. I found some internet pages using E7 and F7 chords to replace E and F.
When the video ended I started strumming my classical and smiled when everything came together and I heard the song emanating from my guitar. I then found another youtube video which showed a more complete version of the song, showing how to play the arpeggio intro.
I returned to my studio, plugged in the electric, turned on the amp, and practiced House for 30 minutes.
I then decided to work on a single scale set to 120bpm using the ipod metronome. Last week I was practicing quarter notes set to 120bpm, which is slow moving. During my 3rd lesson with Lou on Friday he told me alternate picking is used for 8th notes, which meant I needed to hit 2 notes for a single beat. So I had to double my speed and get into a rhythm with the 120 beat. I found that by consecutively picking a single note as a quarter note, followed by picking the second note and then back to the first, I could find the beat and correct speed, which allowed me to properly move onto the remaining notes of the scale. I practiced this for 35-40 minutes.
