I love learning like this!

It just works out well for me... we only had the three beginners and the teachers last night so we skipped the lesson-y part and just went straight downstairs to play. Two hours downstairs with the drumset and the big amps! It was fun :-)
Figured out different parts for each of us on Squeezebox and worked on Love Removal Machine quite a bit. Still not up to speed on So What, but it was fun slow too. We still need to work on the riff a bunch more, that was almost comical, but we've got 4 weeks till the next show.

This week:

I basically just played two songs that I don't know from a hole-in-the-wall! One we'd worked on just once and the other I was given the chords downstairs ("oh, it's easy") and the band just launched into it and we just went for it. I'd never even heard it before. We played it about halfway through and then it was decided we needed to make a better distinction between the verses and chorus so we changed the strumming pattern for the verses and launched it again. And it worked! D was majorly impressed when I told him about it.

I'm enjoying the crap out of learning this way, it's just so cool to learn a part and then toss it all together, modify your part, and roll with it. And we tried my idea for the main riff in the Pink song, it's played 6 times at the beginning and there's no way all of us are going to get it spot-on at the same time. So I suggested we try it with each of us playing it once, solo, and then passing it to the next person. Three guitars trading off the riff across the stage would be cool. I think we can make it work too, the timing's off still, but we're not all up to speed on it yet and it's a hard one to get the rhythm right.

And here's the print I made as a gift for the school (made one for my mom too for Christmas). I printed an 8x10 and framed it and gave it to them along with the DVD's mom sent. Told them I just really appreciate being able to do this, that it means a lot to me. I made some 4x6 prints too for anyone in the group who wanted one. They thought the DVDs were cool.

New songs...

... I'm wrecking the crap outa my fingers on The Who's "Squeezebox" at full speed at the moment.... doing Cadd9 instead of straight C, I can't get there fast enough. Cadd9 sounds ok but i can't find a way to modulate it, not sure i need to, it's a short chord. Having trouble keeping the modulation or whatever it's called consistent on the rest right now. If i could count a beat it might help, i'm just memorizing it.
Spouse just came in and giggled at me because I'm tangled in wires with the guitar, the laptop and the headphones and he says my headphones are too loud. LOL My 8yo just made me a cup of tea and i can tell when i stop my fingers are going to sting. Unfortunately i have to be careful of my arm because of the breast cancer surgeries, it gets pissed off sometimes and can be a real bitch if I don't watch it. My Dr knows better than to tell me to stop, but I'm also not wearing the compression sleeve i'm supposed to wear when i practice :-( Stubborn redhead :eye roll:

Dreary raining day today but band practice tomorrow.

Band practice tomorrow! Never thought I'd hear myself saying that! :-)

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That was cool

We're starting a new term at Rhythm Fire, so new songs... we all wrote down some we'd like to learn and when they loaded the mp3 players and brought them upstairs for us we started breaking them down into rhythm parts we could learn. And it was really cool to watch the process. We messed around with those a bit and then someone wanted to practice making up solo stuff so I started playing my cool chord progression... and they made up different stuff to go with it, messed around with scales over the chords and then playing the chords in a different order to try and make a verse and chorus distinction. It was cool because it almost sounded like a real *song*. Cool to hear it come from three different guitars and sound like it might be something some day.

I did it!

This is me playing lead on "Free Fallin" with Rhythm Fire on 10-30-2008



I got "Heartbreaker" figured out, played what I could, faked the rest and didn't mess up my solo on "Free Fallin" too badly at all (the drummer went into the ending part so i stopped, and then the singers started again). But we looked good and it was fun and D and several friends from work came. And my Spouse, kids and mom all came (most of the audience was mine). I wasn't even really too nervous before we went on, we had set-up and sound checky things to be busy with and I just wandered onstage and off as I felt like i needed to to stay calm. D was very impressed with what I'd learned just since September and it felt really neat to play in front of people and finally feel like I can say "I play guitar".

My name's Mommy... and I play guitar! :-)
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