Hi Efe! Wishing you and your family a great weekend. Here’s what I’d like you to work on this week.

This Google Drive will have all the required material for this week. I’m having a delay right now. Everything will be there during the day on Sunday, January 18th. Efe – Jan 17th

Regarding my notes on last semester’s student report, I’ve implemented a plan here that gets you to practice a half hour a day.

Experimenting with new Powerchords — 5 minutes

For these, remember to use fingers 1 and 4 on your Left Hand. — Only use fingers 1 and 4 for the powerchords I give you for now. (There are powerchords with more notes in the actual chord, but I’m not going into that this week. I just want you understanding the most basic type of powerchord for now; we’ll get to those other ones later.)

  • Play them anywhere on the bottom 4 strings. (E, A, D, G.) Don’t go up to the B or high E string with these; we’ll talk about those strings next time. 
  • ^ This is to say: Find the notes of this scale on the bottom 3 strings only. From here, you have to play that chess-like game I told you about :) which is when you start from the root note (the chord’s letter name), and then move 2 frets sideways and then 1 fret up.

Smells Like Teen Spirit — 15 minutes

There’s a video of me demonstrating the main riff of this song at 60BPM; half the original speed. Dedicate some time to playing this riff on repeat; exactly as you see me doing here.     

  • Don’t worry about the percussive picking you see in this video. As I told you in class, I’ll be showing you that technique a little later.        
  • There are 2 pictures in this week’s Google Drive that pertain to this song. 1: the 4 main powerchords that are played in this song. 2: the G powerchord. Be mindful of this chord. So many guitarists overlook this chord in this song.
  • Make sure you’re sticking to the exact same strumming pattern that I’m using in the video.

E minor pentatonic scale — 10 minutes

— Well done on memorizing this. Keeping playing around with this over the backing track.

— Feel free to add vibrato on any of the notes in this scale so far. Remember your term, the “wiggle” :) this is what I’m referring to.

— We’re forgetting about the B major chord for now. I was mistaken in attempting to push you to learn this chord; it’s a bit high-level for you right now. You’ll get there eventually. 

— Play the E minor, E major, and G major chords over this.

Final words

A little bit of practice everyday is far better than a huge amount of practice in one day. I’m strictly stopping you from doing a ridiculous amount of of practice in one day, because I don’t want you to risk hurting your hands. This is, indeed, a risk that some guitarists overlook and end up hurting their hands with.

It was a good lesson today, Efe. Thank you for your hard work. See you in a week!