Instrumental lesson Diary

Guitar Lessons

1. In today's lesson I learnt some basic chords as well as some strumming patterns, I briefly looked over the strumming patterns although the main emphasis was on learning the main chords and their shapes.

2. Today we did some refresher work on the chords we had covered last week and proceeded to learn some chord progressions, these were an interesting addition and made the strumming patterns significantly more interesting.

3. Today we did some further work on chord progressions and also did some experimenting and improvisation exercises, combining chords, their progressions as well as strumming patterns. These all came together nicely and some of the chord progressions we experimented with gave me some new ideas to add or try in my composition.

4. I decided today that I wanted to learn a song I liked on guitar called "cliffs of Dover" by Eric Johnson. I already had an idea about the main riff so we worked on improving it, and learning more of the main melody. I was also given some exercises to help improve finger coordination which would help with the fast main melody.

5. In today's lesson We practised the finger exercises again and did a little work on the main melody. The main emphasis was the exercises though, more specifically the execution of them properly, playing them as accurately as possible rather than as quick as possible.

6. Today we learnt the intro to the song which sounds great but was quite hard to play. To help me learn it and be able to play it faster, I was given some scale exercises to practise. We briefly went over them but left the majority of them for the next week.

7. In the next 2 lessons we went over the exercises again and again, we worked on coordination and finger placement. I was using the wrong fingers to play notes a lot of the time which was becoming detrimental to the speed and accuracy of the execution of the exercises.

8. During today's lesson we played the whole song, combining the intro, main melody and some of the other sections I had learnt at home. We played through the song several times and even experimented with some improvisation using the scales we had learnt earlier.

9. Today we started playing more cliffs of Dover, but my teacher told me to try a new song called "I'm alright" by Niell Zazza as It had a similar structure and riff pattern to Cliffs of Dover. I loved the melody of the song and so we got to work on learning the main riff as soon as possible. It was fairly easy to learn and I wanted to see if I could gain some inspiration from the song to use in my compositions.

10. We did more work on the main melody today, playing it at different tempos and playing each individual section over and over again, before bringing it all together at the end playing it at the correct tempo with all the parts. I was still struggling a little so we agreed that next week we would learn some exercises that would help benefit me with this song.

11. As agreed last lesson, we worked on some exercises, mainly the scales such as d major that made up a large portion of the song, and is also what the main melody is made up of, so becoming more proficient and confident in these scales made the song significantly easier to play, even after only a few lessons of learning scales.