Lesson 3

I played "Bad Moon Raising" for Phil. Turns out that I'm not playing a shuffle, more of a dotted eighth and sixteenth instead of a triplet feel. This is the timing used by SRV for "The Drop", as opposed to a true shuffle used in "Pride and Joy." He also mentions that "Texas Flood", another SRV song I mess aound with, has a Swing feel, which has the shuffle timing, but with less emphases on the back beat.

I'll play some 12 bar blues this week and try to get that shuffle feel. I been humming it since the lesson, and I got it down pretty well below 100bps. I'll try to speed it up as the week goes along and see how it feels. The important word here is feel. There's no counting allow, just got to go slow and memorize the feel.

I notice that my fingers need streching too. We played the Chuck Berry shuffle which requires a small strech for the entire 12 bars, and my hand was staring to cramp up.

We also worked on soloing. Phil's main suggestion was to concentrate more of rhythm than melody, cause that'll keep the audience more interested. I'm record and solo over my own progressions with 1, 2, and 3 notes. This is great, since I don't need to memorize any scales. I already know a few scales(modes), but only feel comfortable with the pentatonic minor in 2 pseudo-positions. Pseudo, cause it's not even across all 6 strings. One position has 7 notes and the other has 5 notes, but it's all one really needs for the blues.