but now i’m saved in the eye of the tornado
guitar news: Yesterday for the first time I hit 100% speed on Tornado of Souls. I was going to see about recording it but after several hours of searching I can’t find my woefully low quality microphone. This has taken about two weeks of intense practice (80-100 hours) so I am quite pleased but it’s not perfect so there remains room for improvement. Easily the biggest hurdle I had when learning this was some pull-offs1 across rather giant finger stretches (10th to 17th fret). This is not too hard until you’re playing 16th notes at 196bpm and suddenly it IS very hard and not only that, but it’s pretty hard on your hand muscles if you practise it repeatedly, which you will because it’s the hardest part even though it only accounts for 10 seconds of the solo.
I’m basically practising my behind off right now because I’m obsessed. As of today I have developed a shortish practice routine to get my improvement more focussed on things I care about as well as maintaining general technique, as all too often I get bored of an exercise and start noodling and this is not time which translates to a useful gain. It consists of:
3-5 minutes: chromatics
10-15 minutes: scales Each shape/mode of A natural minor/C major all over the fretboard, straight runs, seconds, thirds. Ascending/descending. At some point I will expand this to A harmonic minor as well.
15 minutes: sweeping/finger rolling
15 minutes: legato technique/stretching/finger strength (finishing with the 6 minute trill, which, honestly, makes you want to die)
20 minutes: play a few songs (stuff like Tornado of Souls, Master of Puppets, Mirror Mirror… things that are challenging or just generally useful for maintaining and building stamina/technique)
20-30 minutes: Learn something new (currently Glasgow Kiss by John Petrucci) including broken down exercises for stuff I’m struggling with.
15 minutes: improv. over backing tracks (probably more useful to focus on just one and play it 3-5 times)
This adds up to a couple of hours at most so it’s achievable, and you could break it into 2x 1 hour sessions and alternate them daily if you wanted. I’m a firm believer that you can get reasonably good by 1 hour (or less!) of practice a day as long as that hour is focussed and it’s not just spent noodling in front of the TV or jamming along sloppily to songs you half know. Scales are boring and practising them repeatedly is not entirely useful because linear runs up and down scales always sound unoriginal, but they CUNNINGLY DOUBLE as warm up time. As you can see it is cleverly broken into fairly short chunks so that I should be able to keep my attention focussed. OBVIOUSLY this is designed for ME and I feel that legato and sweep picking and improvisation are things I would like to get better at.
In other news: ’twas my birthday yesterday. I am getting old. I know this because my sister bought me a book of cryptic crosswords and my dad bought me a soldering iron. Birthdays are not what they used to be. But we finished a cryptic crossword today so all is okay. It is pretty annoying because my sister is really quite good at them and I have to stay alert or she makes me look bad.
The soldering iron is so I can fix my other guitar (Ibanez RG1570), which is currently unplugged in every sense of the word. I just play my S7320 at the moment; I am not sure if there are any rules about playing 6 string songs on a 7 string but if there are I’m totally breaking them.
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1. these are not what you’re thinking.
