I had a great lesson with Tim today. He's been working hard on his "Blues You Can Use" book. I am really happy with the progress he's made on this particular exercise. Keep up the great work, Tim!
This was Charles' third lesson. He's been practicing hard and it shows. All his warm up exercises and scales have improved and so have his chords. Today we added some new chords and we started power chords. He did a great job on the Green Day song I gave him. We finished off the lesson with a new Blink 182 song and a bit of "Smoke on the Water".
Last Friday, five of my students teamed up to play a song at their school. There were actually seven performers in all, as two of their friends joined them to help with the singing. The group included Katie, Caroline, Ali, Vanessa and Margaux on guitar along with Julia and Maxine on lead vocals. They performed "Speed of Sound" by Coldplay. They did a great job! You can hear them here or see the video.
Ian is a fan of the blues. We've been working on pentatonic and blues scales across the neck. We've also been working on the chords for the 12 bar blues in various keys. So far, we've done the keys of E, A, D and G. As well, Ian's been learning blues turn arounds in each key. Today they were all sounding really good. Aside from the blues, Ian has been learning some Beatles tunes. He's been working on "Day Tripper" and "Let It Be". Today we added "Something".
Shane is my first student on Saturday mornings. It's great to start off the day on bass. We began with some warm up exercises followed by pentatonic and blues scales up and down the neck. Then, we continued with major and minor scales and arpeggios around the cycle of fifths. Last week, Shane began work on 12 bar blues bass lines. We played through the one from last week then Shane began learning a second one. We also worked on slapping. Shane came up with a cool slap bass line so I got on the drums and we jammed on it for a bit. Eleven o'clock already?
