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Day 1 - Day 2 - Day 3 -

Day 4 - Chapter 5 (June 26, 2007)

It's day 4 of my week-long quest to go through every exercise in John Petrruci's Wild Stringdom. As you may know, I have given myself 7 days to go through all eight chapters of this great book. I also have been listening to the live version of "When Dream and Day Unite" most of the day while working. I only recently discovered this album and am so glad I did! Petrucci is just such a gifted musician.

In this chapter, John focuses on teach us how to unlock our creativity. He shows a few sample "licks" and mixes up various ways to build variations on them up and down the neck. Some are kind of bluesy, and some have strong metal potential. I'm finding the theory easier to digest, and I'm finding that I master the tab positions more quickly. Because I don't yet read music, I have to really focus on which string and fret numbers I'm supposed to play. I also like how Petrucci shows the up-stroke and down-stroke on the notes, as well as which fingers are to play which notes.

Example 93 has some  great string bending exercises and the chapter ends with the full guitar tab for the Voices solo.

I'm finding that I'm not taking the time to go back and review what I've already learned. Getting through this content quickly makes for a great survey of the kinds of concepts I should be working upon, but I should really dedicate a day per page, rather than a day per chapter in order to really retain all of this information. Maybe that will be a future blog...