EPTI started guitar "again" - if you scroll down my old blogs you'll see I attempted 1-2 miserably failed weeks of guitar every 5 years or something.
It's been just over 6 months since I started now but really I spent 2-3 of those degenning dota and had to restart my callouses etc, so fuck it, can I get away with saying I've been playing for 3-4 months? To be fair I think someone who can play 30+ games of dota in a row without dying can get away with saying whatever they like.
Either way it's probably my greatest achievement so far in life to come this far and put this much time into something that wasn't vidya games after being a degen for so very long (I guess I'm still a degen, but now I degen guitar instead lol?)
This blog is just some stuff I done recently
1) I learnt and practiced the solo to Endless Rain (XJapan), I'm finally closing in on 100% speed which i think is 78 bpm
TURN VOLUME UP LOL!
2) I have a Rocksmith cable (that's the guitar game, I bought it a few weeks into guitar learning coz I thought it might be motivational, but I very quickly realised that I'm far happier "learning under my own devices" than trying to do what a game tells me to do)
Anyway I have the cable so I spent some time setting up Reaper and Amplitube which lets you plug your guitar into your PC instead of an amp and add special effects to it. And importantly it lets you record yourself without having to go through a 5 year old webcam.
TURN VOLUME BACK DOWN LOL!
and cover ears potentially coz i sound like shit here
3) I finally got my action/truss/bridge to places I feel comfortable with and it looks like the barre chords are getting decent, although I still struggle committing any amount of time to chord transitions. Today I realised that the key to this is to put on a song/backing track and just play along to it. I don't get bored practicing solos but I get bored in minutes practicing chord transitions, but I know that practicing them alongside a song/backing would remedy this really well, so that's what I'll aim at doing next
4) I purchased a swede guitar strap which was very expensive due to delivery costs and I should have spent more time trying to find a UK store that sells them I guess. I was gonna post here asking which strap to buy but I done my own research and just went with it.
http://www.musiciansfriend.com/guitar-straps/franklin-strap-2.5-black-suede-guitar-strap-with-silver-stitching
I'm not sure about it. It is a MASSIVE improvement over the plastic cheap strap I had which kept slipping like hell the whole time.
On the other hand it doesn't seem to adjust that much on the shoulder part, and instead you have to use the slots on the tail part of it. I hooked my guitar in at the 2nd slot after reducing the shoulder length of the strap by maximum, and now I got 5 inches of strap just hanging there under the guitar. If I'd used the 3rd slot as I did initially then I would have had 10 inches of guitar strap just hanging under the guitar. Wtf? Is this normal?
Pic:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/30HOlh0.jpg)
5) I got straplocks alongside my strap but the screws don't fit and the existing screws are too big to go in the straplocks. Theres a waste of £20 or whatever the hell it was with VAT and delivery from the US.
But I was smart enough to try the straplock screws in my pickups (which were missing screws after I stripped the shit out of them and used a saw blade to hack into them and remove them and were now held in place with sellotape, RIP guitar body in so many ways). And yeah the pickups are now nicely screwed back into place. I forgot to put the springs back inside them but who knows what those springs are for anyway.
6) I sandpapered my guitar. Yeah, I was whining on forums about not being able to play a note all day because it was humid and I stuck like glue to the guitar, and someone indicated that its probably the finish, and I found out that it's pretty common to sandpaper a sticky finish off your guitar if you don't like it. So that's what I done, and its great so far. (I have an Ibanez gsa60, dunno what year, for reference)
Well, I guess that's it. I hope you like my first video at least, going from 90% speed to 100% speed it a pretty big leap it turns out, I'm still not quite there (I'm practicing standing up too so not too far behind with that which is great). Solo stuff aside, I still need to get my act together with chord transitions in a pretty big way but my idea about using backing tracks to motivate me (and the metronome too I guess) should work great.
FYI I had trouble finding an online metronome that had volume control (so you can watch/listen to stuff online without it blasting out) and eventually I found a great freeware download application called TempoPerfect Metronome Software. No idea if it had adware, probably not, anyway that's what I'm using now
Cheers
