Step By Step (Or Stop By Stop!)

Another new big challenge - soloing with double stops!

WARNING - I'm sharing my progress, these audios contain some very bad soloing by me (awesome rhythm playing is not me you can enjoy that if I haven't spoiled it entirely!!).  The second one is by far less offensive but both are very very poor - sorry!  See told you guitar was my weak link!  This is stage one - I intend to get better so that I can link this learning progression (that's the idea!!!).

Tom is the nicest strummer ever - that's him in the audio (with me attempting to play and totally ruining it!), I think he should just make a CD of that because I'd buy it!!  But when it comes to soloing over it .... ARGHHHHHHHH!  It's partly because I'm not used to his rhythmic structure and he's always throwing in curve balls to mix it up.  But that's what I asked for, it's what I want so no point whinging I just need to figure this puzzle out like all the others.

One day I'll do a post and it will say "oh I learnt this and it was easy" shock horror.  Probably not!  That's not my way, even if it's easy I'll complicate the hell out of it because I want more and because I'm a pain in the backside!

What I have to do this week is use double stops with rhythm and some extra notes.  It sounds easy, I'm sure to lots of people it is, but not to me (ohhh nooooo!).  The first time we tried this a few months back it ended very very badly - poor Tom (and me, I was quite distraught, my fault not his!) but that was months ago and the work we've done together since means I feel so much more confident trying this now.  I'm very proud of that because it's a big thing for me.

Anyway I did try Wednesday in the lesson, I really did, and to his credit Tom was very patient with me and gave me a lot of room just to try and find my feet (sadly I stayed firmly on my arse).  But today I've put on some of his recordings and I've made a little progress over them especially this one.  I'm feeling the rhythm of his strumming a bit more, when I'm not concentrating I can hear the chord changes but when I start soloing that goes to pot so it's something I want very hard to work on because it will help me unbelievably.  
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Anyway - I'm starting simple, I've found some areas that sound mostly nice over most of the chords and I've found alternative close intervals that work melodically so I can change it up a bit.  I've got a few patterns I'm working with which is helping a lot.  Wednesday I couldn't find anything that didn't sound offensive but I'm getting the idea now at least a little.   I'm finding varying up the rhythms the hardest part, I think that's going to be the one thing that is going to take a lot of lessons and practice because it's not natural, I have to learn it, understand it, experiment with it and eventually much like the timing issue feel it more.

For now I need to knuckle down and play, play, play, play, play.  I'm recording so I can listen back and hear when it's not right - ok when it's particularly not right!!!  For instance the first couple of recordings I did my usual and put way too much in there.  But I will figure it out at least to some degree, as long as I can give us something to work off next week that's good and I'm determined not to let him or myself down.  I know Zak will be so grateful too when I finally sort out my rhythm and stop endlessly noodling haha!

One step at a time - try, rework, relearn, review (lots of words with re in them), research (see) and then the next step, push on one tiny bit at time.  It's the best I can do with this but I am really really looking forward to making progress on this and that's a huge driving force.