It’s been more or less 9 months since I wrote the last post on this website. The intention was always to pour myself into this website and my playing but as is the way of things that never quite happened. Just before sitting down to write this post I read through that previous post and it’s almost bitterly disappointing seeing how little progress I have made with those goals. While there have been some developments in my playing that I can be happy with, many of those goals still stand for me and seeing no big movement made in their direction comes as a bit of a kick up the backside.
So with that being said I am taking to this blog once again to use as a weapon for my guitar related goals.
Playing In A Band
I am delighted to say that I have finally been able to jam with a full band for the first time in over 20 years. Admittedly at the time of writing this I have only had one jam session but that was last month with a second jam planned for this month. If all goes as planned this will be a semi regular occurrence. This “band” is made up of my lifelong friend and esteemed writer Gerard Brennan on bass guitar and vocals and his fellow esteemed writer and lifelong musician Simon Maltman on drums and whatever else he feels like for any given song.
So far we are just having fun with it and picking songs we feel we will get a kick from playing. Our first jam comprised of some Megadeth, Black Sabbath, Hendrix, Thin Lizzy, RHCP and a 10 minute long improvised jam version of Malted Milk. You can enjoy that 10 minute long jam here.
That’s Simon on the telecaster but keep watching to see him to switch to the 6 string Squier VI bass guitar for a bit of unscripted madness.
As I said for now this band is about having fun and seeing how things go. There is no pressure for anyone involved other than to show up having learnt what you can and just getting tore in.
The great thing about this band is that it is forcing me to learn songs I might not have learnt myself. It’s always good to expand the musical palette and while my own personal focus is still on blues (more on that below) this allows me to pepper that with rock, metal and whatever else pops up as we plan each new jam session.
Of course the key thing about playing with a band is playing with other musicians, learning to play live and making loads of mistakes along the way. I have seen it said and written in numerous places that one of the single best ways to improve as a guitarist is to jam with mates or play with a band and am grateful to now be able to do this once more.
What About The Blues?
Blues is still very much at the forefront of what I personally want to do. With regards to the lessons I was doing with my teacher Keith Doran, we have actually stopped those. We both came to the conclusion that he had shown me more than enough solid material relating to blues guitar musical theory and rather than dilute that he proposed that I go off and really dig my teeth into what I had been shown. And I promised him I would. And while I’ve been doing that to an extend I maybe could be doing better.
I was looking around for some sort of video series that clicked with how I was thinking about this stuff. I had considered going back to the Justin Guitar blues modules and working my way through all of them but then I stumbled upon this video by Stich Method. What I liked about this was that he makes you think about the 12 bar blues and kind of pre-plan what you are going to play during certain bars. Obviously the long term goal is to not have to think at all but, as with a lot of things in life, it takes thinking about it a lot until not thinking about it becomes natural lol. Like driving!
While watching the video, Stich was doing certain things over certain chords some of which I understood and some of which was new to me but made sense. Ultimately what he was doing was making me think more about what I can and should be playing rather than random noodling. This approach really clicked with how my own brain worked and so I had a look around and found that Stich has some great video series on his channel as well as some paid courses. So for me as part of my guitar journey going forward I’ll be dipping into Stich’s lessons to hopefully help me make better use of what I’ve learnt.
Blues Songs
My overall master plan at the moment can be distilled down to 3 things:
- Play/jam with a band
- Continue to explore music theory concepts in relation to blues guitar
- Learn songs for me
It’s this final point that I will now address here. I recently sat down to start learning a Rory Gallagher song. It’s a bit of a cliche as a guitar player based on this island to say that I adore Rory Gallagher, but I do and I wear that on my sleeve. The thing is I have never sat down to learn any of his songs. I have learnt small bits of a very small number of his songs but never a full song. I have always just learnt bits of songs until I started jamming with that band a month back which forced me to sit down and learn full songs. That’s great but I then realised that I need to also learn songs for myself, songs that I can work on in the background when I get a chance and really deep dive into.
At this time I have opted to learn Do You Read Me which is an amazing Rory Gallagher song. The thing about Rory is that he never played the same song the same way twice. I think with regards to his songs you kind of have to learn them and make them your own while retaining the spirit of the song. But I also am a firm believer in that you have to “imitate before you innovate” and as such I am opting to learn the studio version of the song before even contemplating anything else.
In Conclusion
It is my intention to set mini goals for the week ahead and to do a check-in here at the weekend to say how I got on. I feel that at the start of this blog I was getting too into writing long, informational blog posts but now I am going to lean more towards treating this as an informal journal. I’ll still be posting things that I learn as I go because that is a good way to reinforce things but I am not going to sit down and dedicate hours towards writing those.
It’s a Tuesday night now and after I post this I am going to sit down and play through the setlist for for the next band jam session. I hope to nail down some of trickier bits that tripped me up at the first session.
As well as that I hope to learn a bit more of Do You Read Me. I have the intro learnt (although it needs refined) but I hope to have the main structure of the song learnt so that I can play along with the record.
And finally I hope to have spent some time working through the Stich videos, in particular I hope I plan on working through his very long video on the CAGED system.
Until next time.
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