Yep, the hardest thing is patience when building technique, well worth it though.
Once you’ve set yourself to achieve the technical goals the rest is just a hard fight to reach that imo. I became a much better gtr player/musician after I adopted a more tradesmanlike approach rather than relying on ‘inspiration’ to get things done, not that I’ve done that much but hey
Something that I took good notice of today, and I guess I have always noticed it a bit, is the act of just listening first when upping the speed. Say I’m learning a lick that needs to be slowed down to hear the pitches and rhythms clearly, after getting it slowed down and marking up the chunks by listening, next step needs to be repetitive listening to get those rhythms of the lick in the brain. So just put the lick on loop with a little space at the end to give a small rest between loops and listen to it until it all feels very familiar and I could tap it out without playing the audio file. Then start learning the chunks of it. After getting the whole memorized, at some point in the process of speeding up the audio, the rhythms of the lick begin to get blurred, or maybe even sounding like different rhythms at the new speed, and I need to just put it on loop again and listen at the new speed until it becomes clear again. Only then, start working on playing it at the new speed. In other words, the speed problem seems to be much about hearing rhythms clearly at the current speed, not just getting the hands to make the motions. It’s kind of deceptively obvious. How do you play something that you can’t hear?
When you say working on plugins, do you mean developing plugins or using them?
The tiresome thing about practicing set piece licks and riffs is that the imagination isn’t really involved. Even though eventually they can and will be used imaginatively.
So when repetition fatigue arises I don’t put away the guitar; I practice stuff where imagination is involved e.g noodling over the pentatonics that underlay the chords in a song progression, interest in practice renewed!
It’s a kind of game, finding how to enjoy exploration of the guitar over exploring other things. There’s lots of fascinating discoveries to be made.
For example, adding augmented arpeggios to the toolbox can be easy as one repeating pattern, since the intervals are all 4 semitones, in the same kind of way that diminished arp patterns are moveable shape synonymous because they’re all consisting of 3 semitone intervals in the twelve tone system.
Not developing, that’s above my pay grade, just sorting the wheat from the chaff so to speak while BF sales were around
Although there is a free neural training app I’m going to try that requires using a python notebook to do ‘captures’ of amps and pedals similar to QC/Kemper but in a vst form like Tonex,
so kinda half assed developing there, the actual dev is doing the main code legwork and you ‘develop’ the actual capture and turn it into a vst
