[petelanger]

Holy cow! That is darn near perfect! Very nicely done!

[petelanger]

Beautiful Marty! Thanks for sharing 🙂

[petelanger]

My notes from the “Ain’t No Sunshine” Benchmark Week:

Monday “Cloudy Day”:

Love this! I’ve been wanting to understand percussive playing because this adds so much to your sound. I spent a little extra time today to get this under my fingers. I don’t have it fully down but I got much further along than I expected when Tony first played through! WIN!

I learned that I am muting alternately with the picking hand and the fretting hand:

the AND of the 2 beat (G str X) is muted by lifting up on the fretting hand. Then push down again on the 3 beat as the A str sounds followed by DGB pluck. *

The last 4 measures are the hardest to get the timing down for. Struggling with the two 16th note muted plucks(muted by fretting hand’s pinky while holding the Am chord which is needed for the very next 8th note). I can actually do it isolated if I start on the 2nd beat of the last measure. Posted a Benchmark Video in the forum on this.

I know,*the mute is actually done with the pinky of the fretting hand. Tony doesn’t mention this but you clearly see he’s doing it.

Tuesday “Gone Too Long”:

I can (sort-of) do this thing but I’m still kind of operating the guitar (trying to press the right buttons at the right time) and not playing music through the guitar. Yes, I realize it’s decidedly too soon, less than 9 months since I first had the thought that I would finally begin to learn guitar. But I want so badly to feel the music and be able to express it.

Even though I know the note progression (of the first 2 bars) I am not able to consistently play it without error. And it’s hard to remember the entire riff, tend to lose it by the 6th or 7th measure and that’s because I’m not feeling it! I am just rote learning the positions and trying to rattle them off. Typically I’ll leave out a note or finger the wrong string. The open strings pose a bit of a problem too: I feel I need to mute them before playing the next note, while a fretted note automatically stops ringing once you lift off the fret. If I don’t mute then it seems like an odd sound, so this adds another thing to think about while playing the riff.

Wednesday “I know, I know, I know”:
Amazingly it seemed I did better with these scales. Was able to remember the top 3 (33 notes) in about 20 minutes or so, whereas I could not get the first 7 notes right in that amount of time. I practiced it for hours and still was making mistakes even today as I go back I will flub those first 7 notes somewhere and the second line of the TAB is still very elusive.

Thursday “Wither Away”:
&
Friday “Every Time She Goes Away”:
I’m not really able to play these because the chords are changing too rapidly.
Have to work on the Chord Progression, Am, Em (for one beat), G (for one beat), then back to Am.
So for the remainder of the week I’m just practicing the first 3 challenges of the week.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by  petelanger.

[petelanger]

This is one that really helped me a lot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2onjflSqHNo&t=40s

[petelanger]

I didn’t mean to post here, was replying to one of the replies. Forum won’t let me delete or just leave and emoji. Only a couple of months in but I like the pace so far.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by  petelanger. Reason: misplaced reply

[petelanger]

This is sweet, thanks for sharing! I’m a bit like you: I watched and appreciated my sister’s playing as a kid and wanted to learn but never took the necessary steps, other than occasionally picking up her guitar and fooling around with it.
You know that Beatles song “When I’m 64”, well at 64 I finally started learning!

[petelanger]

Nothing fancy to do! Just copy the YouTube link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbcT6zzzzVWA
(this is not a real link, I just made up the part after the “=”)

and paste it into your post, you will notice the preview of your video “automagically” appear.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by  petelanger.

youtube.com

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

[petelanger]

This is great! Why not put this in the Benchmark Forum since it’s a Benchmark Challenge?

[petelanger]

I posted my first benchmark video, hopefully I can get more up over the next couple of days. I really want to document where I am at.

https://tonypolecastro.com/family-forums/topic/peter-l-1st-benchmark-bill-withers-cloudy-day-monday/

I am playing on my wife’s Takamine because I just sent my Lava Me Air back to Amazon because it wasn’t setup right. I have to wait for the refund and then I’ll order a replacement. Not sure if I’ll order the same thing. I liked the guitar but I over 3mm action on the 12th fret after nearly every reviewer raved about how perfectly their Lava Me Air was set up from the manufacturer. Lava was good with the support though, very responsive and told me to just go ahead and return it.

tonypolecastro.com

Peter L – 1st Benchmark Bill Withers – Cloudy Day (Monday) - Benchmark Progress - Tony's Acoustic Challenge

Peter L – 1st Benchmark Bill Withers – Cloudy Day (Monday) - Benchmark Progress - Tony's Acoustic Challenge

[petelanger]

Thanks for explaining this. Since I’m a newbie at TAC it seemed this forum was here all along but somehow empty. I will be contributing my highly flawed attempts to wrestle with my instrument over the weekend.

[petelanger]

Had to watch it again, this song brings back so many memories of my youth and at the same time it’s a musical and lyrical masterpiece! Pink Floyd in their peak creative phase while reminiscing about the loss of former leader Syd Barrett.

I was singing along with you and Floyd!

[petelanger]

You’re welcome, glad you found it useful. In the beginning when I was just starting out this routine helped me so much when I couldn’t play certain chords cleanly. For example the C, G and B7.

But I discovered I was messing up my E chord, which is actually a simple shape that I thought I had fully learned. Not so! The G string was getting muted and I hadn’t noticed it at first since you’re strumming all 6 strings. But if you transition back and forth from E to E- and don’t hear a difference, that’s a problem.

I would do this exercise, usually 20 reps for each pairing of fingers, and then come back and suddenly I could make the shapes so much better and play with less “thud”.

[petelanger]

Appreciate your encouragement!

[petelanger]

I’m trying to get my sister to start playing again so we can share our experiences. She was so good at 15, was playing so many songs at the time. She never used a pick it was all finger picking or strumming with the fingers. She said she gave it up because when our parents sent her to boarding school in England the school wanted her to learn music theory and she just hated it then.

[petelanger]

I will be upgrading my membership to lifetime. For the cost of 3 or 4 private lessons, I get 5 challenges a week and dozens of other skill building videos along with the input and encouragement of fellow TAC members!
There is still is a lot for me to learn here, even if Tony never adds one iota to the content. But I see that he is posting new videos. He just added one to the Benchmark Forum a couple of days ago. TAC isn’t my only source of learning, but it is my main one.