Bass guitar, visions, etc

Ok. I borrowed my friend's bass guitar and have been playing it a lot. Its pretty different from guitar. I have a lot of fun playing with my fingers and i love its overall timbre. Its literally like a whole new world, and its fun as hell. I basically use the rules for classical guitar picking and apply them to bass, it works like a charm. I can work on what i play on guitar to get better at bass as well.
I have also been thinking about adding bass to my own music. Especially when I have been playing guitar. Ive had many different bass ideas. I already started to make up my own song on bass too. Thus i have decided to buy one for myself

Onto guitar before i forget. Ive been learning some cool technical songs. Im learning this classical intro to In My Own Greed by SPawn of Possession. Once i get it down im going to add in rests, and rhythm variations as there would be in jazz, just to have some fun. Im changing up my practice routine nearly 100%. Im going back to playing more than practicing, but its more of a practice-play. I will improvise and jam on stuff but make exercises out of it or incorporate the exercises i need to work on. It makes it a lot more fun and practical. Im also not recording my practice time. It just gets me so unmotivated. It makes it seem more of a chore when i do it that way. Since then i have been picking up the guitar more often than not, so im glad to see it working. I have been noticing improvement again as well.

One thing i started working on was my left hand's finger placement. It seems like the way to be very accurate is to press the middle of your fingertip onto the string in order that no flesh touches the fingerboard. I should be able to look down at my finger and see passed the gutar. Im finding this makes it much easier not to slip. I think you get a better sound from it, but I am not sure of that. Im not sure of any other benefits but this feels better and more accurate to me. I shall contemplate the benefits more and more as time goes on.

Now...onto a rather strange topic. For a while now I have been getting visions as i listen to music. I did not realize this until somewhat recently though, perhaps a year ago. When i get very familiar with an album or band and I listen to it, i picture things in my head. A lot of the times its a swarm of colors that make other colors that dont exist in our spectrum. I also see textures and "forces". If you give me an album i can tell you what colors it brings up and the cool thing is each time it will be the same. I have tested myself on ceratin albums and they all bring up the same colors. I also see my guitar strings different colors depending on what i play. When I play for a long time and put my guitar down, i can in a way see them still very vibrant with colors. For instance, my low e string is red, and A string is blue, my high e is a bright silver/white. Im not sure of the others just yet. These come and go at different times sometimes.

Ive been listening to music i usually dont. More death metal, jazz, and other random stuff. Its been very fulfilling.

80% of free time?

Ok 90-100% of free time just isnt doable. I need time to rest my mind, to listen to music, and talk to friends. Once i get upt to 6 hours thatll be sufficient. Today I got up to 3, and will definitely get one more in. I just gotta find some more things to practice. Time to work on some songs or something. Ever since I learned to fret as well as pick with my rear deltoids (rear shoulder muscles, right above your latissimus dorsi) I have not had my left wrist's tendons swelling or hurting which is a very good sign. I can also play better as a result. One thing ive noticed when I play scales is that my fingers are someitmes too far over the strings and im trying to correct that. Rule of thumb is that you should be able to play regularly and then be able to slur (hammerons and pull offs) without repositioning your hand/fingers. So thats one thing Im correcting myself on. Also, As a result of my improved fretting technique, I can concentrate more on placement of fingers and hold them in a position high on the neck for longer periods of time. Why is it good to fret and pick with your rear deltoid muscles? Well they are connected to your arms number one. They are the largest muscle that will be able to control your arms. Smaller muscles such as triceps, biceps, forearms, even hand muscles, can not take a lot of tension because well...theyre small. My former guitar teacher told me not to press hard with my thumb (i think it was him?) on my left hand. Good advice but he didnt offer an alternative to it. After thinking a lot about it, you can see why its good though. Also, body building (my new sport) has helped my guitar playing. Not only does it require the same sort of mental discipline to get sufficient results, but it helps a shit load on creating a muscle-mind connection. That might not seem like much but when you start knowing how to isolate muscles such as your deltoids, it effects your performance greatly. Isolating a muscle means using one muscle for a particular movement and making sure other muscles arent used in helping the primary muscle with the exercise. Sometimes other muscles are used to stabalize though. I am in no way saying or implying that you need to body build or lift weights to develope the muscle-mind connection. You can do exercise movements without weights for one. Also a lot of it has to do with relaxing. Once you can relax well, you will become more apparent to tension and will be able to feel where that tension is much more easily.

On to my next topic
Ive noticed there are several phases of practicing guitar or any other art. This will be able the guitar though. Generally for me, in the first hour of practice, its all about warming up. The warm up is key to playing fast, to playing well, on time, accurately, and to express yourself better. Warmingup means to get the blood flowing through your muscles and making them more flexible for a period of time. Well not just your muscles, but more imporantly your tendonds. Warming up will lessen the stress on them, thus allowing you to move more easily.

Phase 1.5 This is sort of part of phase one and not so much its own phase, but it is a significant part in any sort of art as well. Establishing the muscle-mind connection as stated above. The benefits to this are pretty obvious. Become aware of the muscles you use, how you use them and how to RELAX them. All important concepts. Making the muscle to mind connection will allow you to establish coordination with all of your fingers. Building your fingers' strength is very important.

Phase 2 is to broaden the muscle to mind connections? So far thats what it seems like. After you make the first connections you must broaden them so that you can expand your fingers better, shift better, move aroundf the guitar better.

Im still in the process of examining the art of practicing guitar, so right now I have those 2 phases down. For me those are the first things to do when practicing. It usually takes a good 45 minutes for stage 1 and 1.5.


This then leads to my final topic. Guitar/music philosophy. I think at a certain age, at a certain and experience/time with music and more specifically guitar, one starts developing their own philosophy on the instrument. That is learning to apply other concepts not directly related to the instrument, to the instrument. I cant tell you what my philosophy on guitar is, i doubt anyone can, but there are many philosophies on the smaller spaects of it. I think my own philosophy is starting to develop at this point. Its happening whenever I think about guitar/practicing/music outside of being involved with it. Music can be applied to nearly everything in life it seems and thats one quality that makes it so meaningful to myself.

Anyways, im not sure what else to put in this post or how to make it more in depth yet. I just figured i would post before i forget all this. Just making simple observations. I learned a lot of this just by thinking of it. THat is ultimately the best way to learn...to THINK.

Hmm im thinking of devoting 90-100% of my free time to practicing guitar. Im not sure if this will be a good idea or not, I might get burned out too quickly, but with all that practice I will impro0ve so fucking much that it might be worth it. Right now socializing is out of the question, all my friends are away. I will still be body building and may be reading/walking at random time, you know the usual daily activities. Hmm I felt really good when I did 6 hours a day during the summers. I felt like i accomplished a lot. So extending that by a few hours would be even a great accomplishment. May be when I wake up and get ready for work, part of that time could be 20 minutes of guitaring. Like id practice some scales before i work. When i get home id eat and take a quick rest and then get back to practicing. In essence practicing guitar will be bettering me as a person. I will learn more in general thus becoming a better teacher and gianing more of an understanding. I will develope greater technique. I will be able to communiocate my ideas musically much better and create better pieces.

Only bad thing i see to this is i might get sick of it. Im not worried about that though. That didnt happen when i practiced 6 hours a day
so today is the day where my laziness stops and I will put in the time and discipline in my art.

distractions

Why is music so good!?!?

i keep getting distracted from playing guitar because I want to listen to music. At least im not being a complete tool and doing nothing though. Im understand music much better and am listening to it more closely the first time i hear it. Its cool to see how my listening skills develop over time.

The new Cynic album, Traced in Air is a fucking masterpiece. It is going to be a huge influence on my writing in the future. It has already influenced me when I improvise. As a matter of fact im listening to it now. Its very good progressive jazz with a metal edge to it.

Im working on a lot of syncopation now. Im starting off slow and very simple for now. I always thought syncopation was fucking cool, and its hard to do so I want to become a master at it. I think it should be used more in death metal. But with death metal a lot of notes are usually all even, if not then its always beats 1 2 3 or 4 getting accented.

Next thing im working on is rhythmic variations. Im trying to think of jazzy type rhythms and will play them to scales to start out. Once i can get a few down with some scales, I will start writing some melodic progressions and applying the rhythms to those. Again im starting out simple and slow. Its hard to think of all this from the top of my head. I dont really know standard jazz rhythms. I listen to jazz but its hard for me to analyze it because i know very very little. I havent worked so much with my chords but will get back to that soon as well.I remember how they are constructed for the most part, im just looking for the different voicings.

I found a video on youtube that teaches like 240 + chords really fast. It takes different string sets and has like 4 different voicings for each chord. Its a very good exercise, hard to get down.

IM back to getting my practicing time up. Im gonna get to about 4 hours by the end of the day, if not more.

Right now im learning
Atheist: piece of time
Theory in Practice: Colonizing the Sun
Anata: Downward spiral into madness
Metallica: Pulling teeth

Im not sure what else to be learning.

Also Im not sure if I should make a practicing schedule or not. I guess it would make sense to make sure I work on every technique. I wonder if not having one is inefficient.
There are a lot of exercises and shit I do, I kind of just do them at random, when I feel like it. I think I might just at least write them down and make sure I dedicate time to each of them.

I also have discovered that playing ultimately comes from your spine/lower back. That is like the musicians power house. My deltoids control my right and left arms/hands. At first I wasnt sure about the right arm, but today i payed special attention and realized it does. Its great that I found this out because now i can correct my technique even more. It makes it so that I dont need to put any pressure on my thumb with my fretting hand.

WHen you fret you want to bring your fingers to your thumb, not the other way around. When the muscles struggle, other muscles tense up trying to sort of aid the struggling muscles. This is why you need to play slowly! Your larger muscles are what can handle the most tension thats why feeling tension in your hand muscles would be very bad. It will wear you out within seconds. Also, pressing from my rear delts, gives my fingers better control in moving.

My improvisation has developed a lot, and changed, really cool. Im just playing stuff I normally dont. I think part of that was from taking a huge break.

Ive got lots of new music coming in the near future. One or two ambient songs, then some black metal songs. May be something proggressive or jazzy, we'll see.

I think that finally concludes this post!

Finally getting back into motion

Im starting to practice guitar regularly again. My fingertips hurt like hell because my callouses wore away, but its fun. I dont know why, I like to feel the strings ripping through my flesh. I also upgraded to thicker strings so its even more of a challenge, AND im in E standard instead of D. So lots more tension but man my strings sound great and the sustain is long. I love them.

I havent sorted out a definite practice routine quite yet, but will work on that as I go along. One thing Ive noticed is that Ive been practicing in shorter time frames. I used to always practice for an hour at a time. Now Im doing 20-30 minutes at a time. My hands need the stretch and then I dunno I just want a mental break. It might be because I havent played in a while and my job requires a lot of concentration.

Im starting to find some more interesting death metal songs to learn. Looking for stuff thats tuned to standard preferably but if not ill learn it anyway. Right now Im learning some theory in practice and will probablytry some atheist soon.

Working on some ambient/black metal songs that will be released on a split. My friend Thiago knows some dude whose starting a label or something and will release about 50-100 copies of our cd, more details on this later

So i decided to drop classical guitar

as well as viola. My problem with classical guitar is the whole growing my nails out. I cant stand it, ive tried for months at a time and its the most uncomfortable thing ever. Also, classical guitar is like a whole new instrument nearly. I dont play it how i play electric guitar. Since the frets are wider I use my fingers differently when playing up on the neck. I dont like the overall feel of it, and practicing that doesnt really help for practicing electric guitar. Also I stopped playing the viola. Its too hard to get comfortable with. I had the same problem ever since I started. There was something that always felt awkward, plus its waaaay too small for me.

The other day I tried playing the cello. I did a few years ago and it was too big for me then. When I tried it again, I already felt much better on it than I did the viola. I have a feeling if I pick this up, it will come more naturally to me. So I decided I am going to buy one once I have the money. I definitely want to explore another instrument, and there's something about the cello that I really like. Plus I will already have a teacher to teach me so that will work out well. Anyway, I'll end it here, I think there was something else I wanted to post about, but I don't have the time.

Filling my head with creative ideas instead of...

practicing. I havent felt motivated to practice at all. Ive been doing a little more with theory, but more importantly exploring more music. Jazz in particular. Miles davis, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk are all amazing. Every other time ive tried to listen to jazz it felt like random notes and structures or lack there of. I didnt get it, i thought it was cool because i didnt hear it a lot, but i didnt understand anything of it. I was first introduced to a video of Miles Davis playing Bitches Brew. Since then, ive come to understand what i was hearing a little more. Today I took some cds out at the library. I took out one by Miles and popped it in my stereo. From this point on I have figured out what the problem was. Im finding with jazz especially the focus is not on the specific note. What i try to do is focus on the expression of the music. Thats what makes it interesting. Yea theres a melody of course, but how does the artist express that melody? That is what is important, that is what gives the music its own sound and emotion. I never was much of a fan of horns but after hearing Miles play, man I love trumpets. He plays the trumpet like a guitar. Thats how I looked at it. Jazz can many times be simple in terms of technical ability, and then it makes up for it in rhythm and ornamentation. Not only did I decide to listen to the way the music is expressed more, but also how the artist moves from one note to another (not necessarily consecutive).

Anyway this new insight is what I want to incorporate into death metal. I want to have it reflect jazz somewhat. Not in just playing all these weird chords and melodies/harmonies that youd expect from a modern band who claims theyre influenced by jazz. I would like to specifically concentrate on dynamics , space between notes, rhythms, improvisation, and how to express the musical melodies. Also i want less repition. These are what I want to incorporate but its not like im going to limit myself to these. I think the way to make death metal less stale and more interesting is to vary the elements used within the music. Specifically im talking about repition.

In death metal, as well as general metal a riff is a musical phrase that gets repeated. THe whole thing. May be sometimes there are alternate endings. Aside from that the whole thing is basically repeated with no variation. It is repeated between 2-8 times generally. That can be good, but what happens if its a boring riff? You have to sit through that boring riff over and over. I think it would be a good idea to take a little section or part, or melody or what have you, from the riff you are working on and repeat that so the listener remembers it, and feels that it is important. From there you vary everything else that was originally in the riff. I guess that would sort of be like a riff/variation kind of thing. In my opinion metal needs that consistency, so I dont want to make something that just sounds like a blur of notes without a common ground. I think i want to structure songs keeping that in mind. I want to bring "sections" into death metal as opposed to riffs.

Why am I choosing to do this with death metal and not just make jazz of my own or something else, why death metal? Well what I like about death metal that i do not see in any other genre is the intensity and energy. Its a constant flow through out the whole song. I often dont feel that in classical music, jazz, and any other genres. Its heavy. I want to create heavy/intense music that is very well thought out. Energetic music is the best because it moves me the most. If i can make music that is both moving and well thought out, then I have filled two gaps. Death metal isnt 100% stale, but if you look at it every band has the same sort of formula. Repeated riffs, no variation on expression, etc etc. Music to me is more than just playing with feeling. Its more than just listening to the melodies. Its everything in between. More than what you hear. Its what is physically there. What im trying to say is, Music is a reflection of how I feel with an intellectual process of expressing it. Meaning that it is a combination of feeling and choosing how to express that feeling by thinking and planning rather than just playing stuff and say "oh!" that sounds cool. Thus I am figuring out more and more what I want to achieve.




So back to the original topic of the thread. This is why i havent been practicing, I am not sure 100% where I want to take my music. I want to play fresh again instead of doing the same old routines. So im taking a bit of a break. Im afraid to take too long of a break for my skill level will definitely decrease, but i just need to clear my mind and stop being so biased of how i play.