My fourth lesson covered the final couple of pages of the introductory techniques for the basic chords. I have been encouraged by the progress I’ve made up until now and feel that I’m starting to get the hang of this style- at least the basic material.

For this lesson, I started with a review of the melody notes for the A, which I’ve covered in the past, and began incorporating the alternating bass notes at progressing frequencies. What’s not seen in the following set of video clips is the tedious intervals of practice,  removed for your benefit.

 

As you can see, playing the melody notes on their own is straight forward, but combining them with the alternating bass notes takes some time. The next section of the book builds these skills through a couple of basic blues progressions, which you can see in the following video. It starts with a basic blues progression in G and then transitions into a basic blues progression in E.

Now… if you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed that I have now switched sides that I’m playing on. Though this would be an amazing accomplishment and likely the goal of an entirely separate inquiry project, I must confess that I in fact forgot to “flip” the video in the editing stage, as I have done for the other videos, in order to counter my cameras flipped perspective. And once I realized this, I had already deleted the original files to free up space! So I’ve learned not to be so hasty to delete anything… All a part of the learning process that I signed up for in the project, I suppose.

As for the progressions I played in the clip, I’ll be continuously working on them to build up my muscle memory, but in the meantime I’ll be starting into tackling the first couple of bars of “Corrina Corrina”. This next clip is my first attempt at the beginning of this song, and it is consequently not the most enjoyable bit of music (if you call it that yet) to listen to! But, I figured that the whole idea here is to document my progress from start to finish so, here we go! (I remembered to flip this one.)

 

Yeah.. that’s hard to watch!  Even though I chose this song because it appeared to be one Mississippi John Hurt’s easier songs, it has proven to be quite tricky. There are a lot of subtle transition notes that will definitely take me a while to get the hang of. But there’s only up from here! This video is from a few days ago and I’ve progressed a bit more through the song since and will be posting those clips soon. Now that I’m beginning to understand the practice that needs to be done to work through this song, I feel its not unrealistic to complete this in the next two weeks, but only time will tell…