Hi Efe and family! Wishing you guys a great week! 

Ode to Joy was looking quite good today. I’m very happy with where we are for this piece.

Below are the following items of homework for Efe this week: an exercise and a piece aimed at the improvement of the techniques we’ve been working on lately. There’s also a game I’ve given Efe to play.

Outside picking on the circled areas of Ode to Joy. 

  • 20 minutes a day.
  • 68bpm.
  • Work on these most of all. They’re the hardest things to work on this week.
  • Spend time working on these circled areas alone in one day, if that’s all you have time for. 
  • It’s important that we isolate these hard parts of a piece first. Without doing so, the following problem will take place: when playing an entire piece from beginning to end, the same mistakes are made over and over. Whether the mistakes are technical or in the sound of the music. Hence, we must work on the hard parts first so that they are sounding clean. Then after this, we can connect all the parts into a seamless piece of music.

Ode to Joy — the whole piece.

  • 15 minutes a day.
  • 68bpm.
  • Like I said: only do this part once the hard parts are not so hard anymore.

Strumming game.

  • 10 minutes a day.

Play any chord you know well with the strumming pattern in the following picture. Do each tempo I have given. Then play it at whatever tempo you want. It should feel fun. This is a game to play and to try out different tempos in. It’s also a great chance to experiment with how to strum chords. (Since your guitar is a steel-stringed acoustic, Efe, you can strike the strings fairly hard. Not too hard, of course, because you don’t want to damage your guitar.)

  • 75bpm. 
  • 68bpm. 
  • A tempo of your choosing. 
  • I’ve changed the strumming pattern slightly.

— This is the amount of strumming that happens in 2 separate bars. That black line in the middle represents the separation of the bars. The dots at the top represent the 4 quarter notes that fit within each bar. 

— I’ve circled the Downward arrows so as to emphasize that these are the strums that are supposed to sound louder. They should feel “stronger” than the upward arrows.

Lastly:

  • Every 5 minutes during practice, check to see how the left hand is looking. Make sure it is as straight as possible while playing. Feel free to manipulate the guitar’s position relative to your body in order to achieve a straighter wrist.
  • Use a metronome for all the parts that I’ve added a specific tempo.
  • These times are just what I would ask to be done within a day ideally. I know it’s not always possible, so just do what you can everyday. For example, the 30 minutes on 3 or more days this past week was effective. Good work on that.

Keep up the good work, Efe. I’ll see you in a week!