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I really really wish
I’d started playing guitar a lot younger than I did. Maybe my fingers would have stretched a bit easier when I was younger so I’d be able to reach over more of the fretboard. Oh well. I also wish I’d started seriously learning full songs AGES ago. I used to be of the mind that since I only really wanted to play original material, there wasn’t much point in me learning other people’s stuff.
Fuck, was I wrong. I set myself a challenge this year, to learn some hard songs in full. Hard for me, at least. First up was Tornado of Souls by Megadeth. Looking at the tab for it, it scared the shit out of me. But I broke it down into bits, and worked on it, and worked on it, and now I know all of the rhythm parts, Dave Mustaine’s and Marty Friedman’s, and can play it through flawlessly at about 80% speed (I’m working on upping this). I’ve not started learning the solo, as I’m shit at lead stuff, however once I’ve got better at that I’ll take a crack at the solo too.
I’m not up to full speed for the song yet (I can play it at full speed, but with alternate picking for the verse, which doesn’t sound right - the original is played all with downstrokes in the verse, which is what I swear I’m going to do), but so far, aside from learning a kick-ass song, I have observed the following benefits:
- My rhythm playing is tighter than it’s been in a long, long time. When I was at college, noodling a lot of the time, I got pretty tight, then once I left, I stopped playing as much. I was in a band for a while but then that fell apart and my playing got sloppy as hell. Not any more.
- My creative block seems to have shifted. Once the band fell apart, I struggled to write anything, however lately riffs and lyrics have been going round my head again, I’ve started working them out once they come into my head and getting them down so I can’t forget them. I’ve also managed to finish off a song that I had lyrics and a few riffs for but no real structure or ending.
Next up is going to be some Kreator, probably Murder Fantasies. It’s fast, and it’s going to kick my arse, but I’ll do the same as I did with ToS: break it down, work on a section at a time, slowly, then build up the speed. And it’ll give me something to do with my RR3 before I sell it.
