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Day 7, June 29, 2007

Well, I made it! What an amazing week. The 8th and final chapter in Wild Stringdom introduces the learner to the concept of playing non-guitar music. In other words, playing music originally written for other instruments. John transcribes music such as Chopin's Etude No. 2, violin warm-up exercises he learned from a violinist while he was touring in Europe, and lots of other great exercises for improving your lead guitar playing.

This experience has taught me a valuable lesson - it pays to set practice goals and stick to them. My playing is notably better and I feel as though I have gotten out of a rut and reached a new level of ability and understanding of my instrument. Sometimes you just have to buckle down and just do it. I have countless Guitar Magazines reaching back into the 80's through today, but I've never really had the discipline to focus and get through entire songs to the point where I can master them. I learn just enough to fake it and then move on.

I intend to spend July mastering as many of the exercises from Wild Stringdom as I can. In doing so, I am confident that I can then go through Dream Theater tablature books for each of the albums and pick up those songs much faster than I otherwise could. My next goal will be to learn 3 songs from Train of Thought. So stay tuned...