No news is no news

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to schedule a lesson this week. I was hoping to do weekly lessons, but the scheduling system at the music store confuses the hell out of me so I wasn't able to schedule anything.

Practice continues (almost) daily. So far I went light one night last week (20 minutes) and skipped another entirely. I don't feel guilty, as I was pretty sure that would happen, but I'm trying to make sure it doesn't become a habit.

My current practice regimen consists of:

• Right hand warm ups with quarter and eighth notes to a metronome
• Left hand warm ups with quarter notes to a metronome (I'll do a run or two of eighth notes if I'm feeling sassy)
• E minor blues scale in two octaves to the metronome
• Browned Eyed Girl run throughs
• Play some other songs

The first two items I think I have down, although I should probably vary the tempo on the metronome a bit more. I did some of them at 100 bpm last night instead of 120 and I noticed the difference. I also need to figure out some rhythm patterns to use with that blues scale. I've got the fingerings down, I just don't know what to do with it.

The Van Morrison song is another problem. I need to start treating it as a song instead of a bassline that repeats for a long time. One of the ways I'm hoping to do that is through the use of Capo-- software that (among other things) lets me slow down a song without changing its pitch. Once I'm a bit more familiar with it, I think a review is probably in order.

For the moment, I think I'm going to try to learn a couple of other (simpler) songs this week well enough that I can play them all the way through without mistakes. The first is going to be The Misfits' Where Eagles Dare. It's faster than I can play without errors, but slowed down to 3/4 speed I think I can handle it (and it's dead simple). The other is still up in the air, but something slow and more difficult for my left hand is probably in order.