{"id":6350,"date":"2014-09-08T04:51:30","date_gmt":"2014-09-08T04:51:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/?p=6350"},"modified":"2014-09-08T04:57:45","modified_gmt":"2014-09-08T04:57:45","slug":"grandma-rides-a-bicycle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/grandma-rides-a-bicycle\/","title":{"rendered":"Grandma Rides a Bicycle"},"content":{"rendered":"

30 days has September…
\nApril, June, and no wonder…
\nAll the rest eat peanut butter…
\nExcept Grandma, she rides a bicycle!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like my literary genius?!<\/p>\n

This was a poem I learned as a kid and, obviously, it’s nonsense. But I loved it as a 10 year old, and my kids thought it was hysterical until they got to high school (my youngest still loves it.)<\/p>\n

But hey, you’re not here to read nonsense poems so what does it have to do with guitar, you might ask?<\/p>\n

I’ll tell you in just a minute…<\/p>\n

First, look at the first 2 lines of that poem… they sort of go together, right?<\/p>\n

But then the 3rd line is from another state\u00a0and the 4th line is from\u00a0some other planet. It’s funny because it doesn’t say anything that anyone can understand<\/em>.<\/p>\n

“Duh,” you might say, but aren’t you doing the same thing when you play guitar?<\/p>\n

If you take 1 lick from solo A, 1 lick from solo B, 1 lick from solo C, and 1 lick from solo D… and you put them all together, what do you think you’ll\u00a0get?<\/p>\n

Will your solo have a cohesive feel and flow? Will it lead your listener through melodic ideas that take\u00a0them on a journey through the chord changes?<\/p>\n

Bottom line… will you sound like you know what you’re doing?<\/p>\n

I’ll give you a hint… not likely.<\/p>\n

Classic solos are more than the sum of their parts and to completely abandon trying to learn a solo all the way through is going to miss a lot.<\/p>\n

And, to be fair, it’s not even really about the end result… shoot there were dozens of solos that I was never able to learn note-for-note perfect, but the process of trying<\/em><\/strong> to play them as close as I could to note for note perfect is what taught me (and every other professional guitar player I know) how solos are supposed to go together above and beyond just the licks involved.<\/p>\n

Even better is if you CAN’T play them note for note, but you pretend like you have<\/em> to play something at your next gig which is in 5 days. That puts you in a position where you have to come up with something that sounds similar and has the same vibe as the original but is within your technical grasp… now THAT is a surefire way to some massive improvements in your playing (deadlines work wonders \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

The Gettysburg Address isn’t just a bunch of sentences strung together… neither is the Iron Curtain speech or the I Have A Dream speech or any famous speech. And your solos shouldn’t just be a random group of licks or notes strung together with no thought as to where you’re going or why.<\/p>\n

That’s a lot to chew on for today so I’ll let you think about that until tomorrow….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

30 days has September… April, June, and no wonder… All the rest eat peanut butter… Except Grandma, she rides a bicycle! Like my literary genius?! This was a poem I learned as a kid and, obviously, it’s nonsense. But I loved it as a 10 year old, and my kids thought it was hysterical until […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6350"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6350"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6353,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6350\/revisions\/6353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}