I’ve been stuck in a sort of writer’s block for a while now. I’ve been trying to wait it out. In the mean time I’ve been re-working my guitar skills. Ever since I started to focus more on the production side of things my guitar skills have been decreasing and decreasing and decreasing.
I picked up The Jazz Theory Book by Mark Levine a few weeks ago. I felt like I needed to put in some more time into learning music theory again. It’s been so many years since I’ve had any sort of theory lessons. I think the last time I had lessons was in grade 11.
I also picked up Creative Guitar 1: Cutting-Edge Techniques by Guthrie Govan at the same time. I actually downloaded a PDF of it before and read the first few pages, and thought it was pretty insightful. I was starting to get tired of reading off the super bootleg version PDF though. There’s a lot of good stuff in there that isn’t just scale exercises, finger dexterity, speed exercises. Just a lot of practical advice on how to improve as a musician. Most of the exercise stuff I’m pretty much past, but it’s always nice to have more variety of exercises for warm-up. I might just need to pickup Creative Guitar 2.
One of the best things I picked up from these books is the idea of constantly transcribing music. I never really bothered to do it before because there’s always tabs available on the internet. So recently I’ve been trying to work on picking up things by ear.
It helps train the ear, and also helps me appreciate the track that I’m trying to transcribe even more. Right now I’m working on Cannonball Adderley’s rendition of Autumn Leaves. I have it stuck in my head all the time now. I wake up and I hear this in my head.