TXBA Speed Workshop Level 5

This week I was contemplating to delay this post as I barely passed exercise 24 and it turned out that the increased speed on that exercise gave me some grief, so I had to go back and do the end of the exercise on a way lower speed to get my feeling and the hand movements squared out and only then slowly build up speed.

This week has another curve ball thrown at us in the form of a reverse racking in exercise 26. It is really difficult for me to mute strings with one finger while pressing down with the others to let these strings ring.

When I am done with this review I will go back to level 1 and redo the exercises and only cross an exercise off after I can do them effortlessly and cleanly. Anything less will become a problem further on down the road and with each progressing level that problem is getting bigger.

The success of this workshop depends a lot on our work ethics. I know it is difficult to stay with an exercise until it becomes second nature but the guitar is not an easy instrument and blues is not an easy genre. I have 3 kids playing concert level classical music on the piano and violin with ease and I am here paying my dues by repeating the same lick over and over again.

When I wrote this yesterday I heard this tiny little voice in the back of my head telling me that I shouldn’t talk about work ethics if I cannot follow through myself. So I went back to level 1 and started all over again. To my surprise I was able to push through to level 4. With that I could finally put all my self doubts to rest that I just skimmed through. It is also a testament on the teaching of the course.

Cheers – Andy