Term 3 - Lesson 3

Our lesson today was about sight reading which we haven't covered much this year. We talked about reading rhythms such as semibreves, minims and crotchets and how they fit within a bar. I already knew about this because of my music GCSE and my time learning guitar with Yamaha. The song of choice was Cold Sweats by James Brown and it was simple. I picked it up quite quickly as this was a skill we used every week at Yamaha - we'd start a new song and learn it with help from the tab and as we became secure in playing it we would cover up the tab and read from the notation. Doing it this way helped me to learn the notes on the fretboard a lot so I would like to continue practising it. It will help me achieve my goal of knowing all the notes on the fretboard and will also make me more versatile as a musician because if I work a session guitarist in the future, I will be able to quickly work out something I've been given to play. Overall I found the lesson helpful but as I completed the task easily I don't feel that it stretched me enough so I will endeavour to do this at home.

In my home practise lately I have been experimenting with scales a lot. We are playing Killing Me Softly for the next gig and it doesn't have a prominent guitar part to learn so I have had to be creative. By playing around in an E minor pentatonic I have written a counter melody that I think suits the song well so I am proud of it. My bandmates appeared to like it too :) In terms of my development as a musician I feel this challenge has encouraged me to have my own style and way of playing. For this final gig this is very important as I really want to get a distinction. I am regularly practising The Longest Wave by Red Hot Chili Peppers so that my progress can be videoed in the lesson next week and I plan to learn the verse and chorus parts to the song in order to play it in full.

Moreover, this has motivated me to start creating my own melodies and chord progressions at home. I have got my own MIDI keyboard and Cubase on my computer so I plan to start putting my ideas together. In the future I will buy an audio interface so that I can record my guitar too. This will also let me develop my skills and knowledge of other instruments, for example drumming. After our DAW task (in which we had to create 4 drum beats) I want to get better at arranging drums.

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