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I’ll try pasting it here. Maybe the slight change will confuse the software enough so that it won’t block the post.
Greg – you put equal care in your reply to me. Thanks for that. I really look forward to hearing back from you in about 2 months or so.
I’ll share one other tidbit. While I was able to blow through most of FBW rather quickly, it wasn’t until my 6th pass through it when I was first able to truly complete it. I always got hung up on the writing project at the end. No doubt a big part of that was my own stubbornness. I resisted using one of the canned 3 or 4 chord progressions, and I think that was because I didn’t want my first song to be something that had already been done a thousand times. There’s only so much you can do within those constraints, so I cheated by ignoring them.
For me, the catalyst was throwing in a “bVII” (flat 7) chord. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means just yet; you’ll learn about it in the course. It’s one of those what I like to call “spice” chords that really perk up your ears. Often it’s one of the chords included in the ‘Key Chords” daily lesson on the third Friday of the month, accidental chords technically falling outside the key (i.e., including one or more notes that are not within the key) but sometimes encountered in music written in the subject key. Once I removed the constraint, my writer’s block lifted and out popped a piece of music penned by “dr dave, the mad arpeggiator.” https://tac.tonypolecastro.com/topic/15362-mark-the-date-the-monkey-is-off-my-back/?tab=comments#comment-171657
And I’ll offer another thread from the old TAC Community (hurry up and check these threads out it before they are forever lost to the ether when TAC HQ deletes the old Community) as additional inspiration for where Fretboard Wizard might lead you, namely transcription. I noticed in this thread I mentioned I was at the time on my fifth trip through FW (but I think it was actually my 6th!).
https://tac.tonypolecastro.com/topic/15344-wild-roving-by-dr-dave/?tab=comments#comment-171456
The skills I learned in FW, together with some ear training to recognize intervals, major/minor tonality etc., have taken me to a new level of musicality. TAC is not a one-stop shop. Ear training plus some additional theory are coming from a variety of other sources. Perhaps the most valuable lesson I have learned over time is that all this information sinks in over a a long period. In the background, a chain reaction is occurring – imperceptibly at first, until it all erupts like a dropped beer can!
Have fun!