Mike...keep us posted on how it goes. I see what you mean. Memorizing a solo is not my main objective either. I
also want to have a repetroire of useful really cool licks to go to on the fly. I have already memorized a ton over
the past few years as I'm sure you have. Keeping them fresh is one's memory is another issue. I think I have
forgotten more licks than I can remember; but, I jam maybe once a month. Trying to keep them my "go to" memory
bank is tough just jamming to backing tracks at home. It gets old also when I do attempt to just reinforce, reinforce, reinforce.
Performing like you do seems to me to be a key hard wiring those licks. I guess turning professional
is the key and then grinding it out on the road!
Strive for Griff's "3 gig" rule Elio. Use the lick successfully at 3 gigs in a row and you own it!
So what you're saying is that I have to find 3 people willing to listen to me play?![]()
Mike how is your approach working for you?
Well it's been almost a month that I've been at this. I came up with a system for practicing that seems to be working for me so I thought I'd share it. Maybe it will help someone else too.
After a couple of days of playing individual licks over jam tracks when the right time came around, I started trying to put things together and I was having trouble transitioning smoothly between sections. So I decided I needed to practice that. Being a professional computer geek I analyzed it logically as follows. There are 5 transitions, 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, 4 to 5 and 5 to 1. Since each section has 5 licks (for now) there are 25 possible transitions between each section. For each lick in a section I wrote down (using GuitarPro) the transition to each of the 5 licks in the next section. I also added a bass track so I can hear the chord changes. I've playing along with GuitarPro going through the five keys in the 5x5 jam tracks.
I've put in about 15 hours using this method. So far so good. My transitions are much smoother. I've also decided to use the 20 hour rule that Griff posted about a few weeks ago. I'm going to do 20 hours on each transition, that's 625 different transitions. More computer geekness here; I decide to practice at 96 BPM and so given the number of bars in transition I figured out how many times I needed to play the 25 combinations to equal 20 hours of practice each. Obviously I'll want to be able to do them faster but I'm pretty sure this will get all this stuff "under my fingers."