Lesson #2: Lord knows, I shoulda been gone

After a week with no lesson (boo not scheduling soon enough, learned my lesson (har)), I was back this week. Here are the highlights.

We went over a new warmup exercise for the left hand, as well as a string skipping exercise working down a string and a fret, and then back up. That one is going to take awhile to bring up to speed, which is a good thing.

We talked a little bit about practicing, how often to repeat exercises in a given session, and then about applications of the blues scale I had worked on last time.

As an example of the blues scale, I'm going to learn Sunshine of Your Love by Cream. It's a simpler riff than last week's Brown Eyed Girl, which is exactly what I was hoping for. I think I already have it mostly memorized, so it'll be a nice piece to feel good about (and maybe even bust out the fuzz pedal on once in awhile) while I still work out the kinks on playing Brown Eyed Girl cleanly.

We did a play through of Brown Eyed Girl, with my teacher on guitar, which was fun. I screwed it up a lot, but I almost always found myself and got back by the next "1" beat. Still a lot of work to do before I feel like I really "know" the song and could play it with someone, but it's coming along. It'll stay in the practice schedule until I get it down.

To finish things up, I was shown Killing Floor by Howling Wolf. I didn't actually know this song (which is kind of embarrassing, since it's pretty great), but its got a cool, driving 12 bar blues pattern that I like playing. It even has a couple 16th notes in the riff, so I can start practicing those (everything I had been working on before was 8th notes, with the exception of what I think are some triplets at the end of the Brown Eyed Girl prechorus).

All in all, I had a good time with it. I had been feeling down about my practice for a couple of days, feeling like I wasn't making much progress, but after tonight's practice I feel like a few more things clicked into place. I'm looking forward to this week's practice sessions.

Next lesson is scheduled for next Thursday night, but I just realized I'm supposed to pick my wife up at the airport at 6:30 in Detroit. I suppose I should see if I can fix that.