Question: What are you practicing?

Mark Wein

Grand Poobah
Staff member
I know that this is really "String Theory" forum material, but I want people to talk about something other than the dystopian present. I put this out there on all my social media and I'm curious what folks are doing during their forced-staycations.

What are you guys practicing today? I’m going to warm up with the metronome for a bit and then search for some II-V licks to steal. Then I’m going to work on tunes for the Virtual Happy Hour concerts that I’m planning this week!

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I've been practicing Waylon Jennings' 'Rainy Day Woman', doing a version with the pedal steel bits converted to guitar. It's a lot of fun.

I also restrung my Mockingbird and tuned it down to C standard and learnt High on Fire's '10,000 Years'. Going from playing Waylon on the Tele to the fuzzed out Mockingbird in C almost feels like they're two different instruments.
 
After hearing a repeat of Steve Miller being interview on Stern, I've been playing a bunch of his songs.
 
‘Classical’ piano, almost exclusively, lately. My first instrument, and the one that I’m best at.

Bach, Ligeti, Rachmaninoff, Stockhausen, Messiaen, Corigliano, Adès, Copland, Prokofiev, and Ives.
 
Trying to do some songwriting on the acoustic.

On the electric - triads and chord inversions. Trying to get my brain into the 'modern worship' genre since that is what I will be playing when the pandemic calms down. That is chord inversions...lots of delay and stupid amounts of reverb.

Also trying to just get some sort of focused practice time instead of just messing around - though that has it's uses as well. Yesterday I was messing with the harmonic minor scale...
 
We’ve decided to record songs written by our friends. Did one yesterday. We don’t really have a proper recording set up. Did it all on an iPhone. Adds to the charm.

I want to do everything with my approximation of boogie Woogie style piano. Fun so far.
 
My practicing has been almost non-existent this past week, but that's because I've been really hunkering down and trying to make some decent progress on the Allan Holdsworth "UnReal Book" I've been working on the last two years.
 
These days most of my practice time is spent working on country blues fingerpicking ditties on the acoustic.

I have been meaning to spend some time boning up on some more technical stuff and grow as a musician a little, because that would feel really good. For this purpose, I have pulled out my copy of the Expanded Blues Guitar by Mr. Mark Wein. Which I recently had to re-buy because my original copy got mixed up with a stack of books Mrs. Roach gave away, but that’s a story for another time. :mad:
 
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