Hi guys! How’s everyone doing on their practicing?
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I’m taking some time off right now. Just need to refocus.
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I’m still on “day one” (which is more like “week one” and starting to look like “month one” lol) of Alternate Picking and Sweep picking (practicing each one every other day) . I realized I was doing mistakes here and there (even in the fundamentals 
) so I decided to drastically slow the tempo down and really focused on playing EVERY exercise perfectly before I could move to higher tempos.
I consider these first two weeks as a “false start”. The good thing is that, in the process, I am understanding the “logic” behind each exercise and am much less dependent on the tabs. Slowing the tempo down has also been really helpful in the “Out of the box” phases… Guess I needed this reassessment. Now, there’s only one way possible…
Forward 
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Hey @brunobailly7,
that’s great! Just keep practicing! Remember, that every guitarist has to go through this. And practice is no fun when you start a new exercise, because everything is new, the fingers don’t move like they should. But they will! It’s biological! 
The muscles have a memory. That’s why they often do weird movements - they “remember” movements you trained before.
All that will become easier as you train your fingers and learn how your music works!!! And more fun!
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Message received. Thanks for the encouragements
Your message reminds me of a short video of EVH that’s circulating in social media at the moment… Where he says “Keep playing man! Gotta keep playing. It’s the only thing there is : music! So keep playing. Alright?.. Gonna come looking for you if you don’t” 
Has anybody else seen this? It’s like the ultimate motivation message 
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Haha it totally is a great encouragement!
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Thanks for asking!
Actually I have to admit I have not been able to find the time to practice as much as I used to.
This topic is a great reminder that I need to seriously look at my planning and make some time! Thanks @fabianarellano31
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Yeah definitely! I’m only asking cause I’ve been skipping a little more than usual(maybe 3 days at most) and just been curious how my friends are doing.
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I like this post a lot. It reminds me that nothing is given to you easily. Work hard for it and it WILL work out in the end.
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Still working on
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I’ve had a bad time lately, but I kept on practicing almost every day. I’m also focusing only on a few excercises of the program trying to improve them and I’ve added to my schedule the study of music theory and solfege.
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Sounds sweet Franco, loved these bends close to the end too!
Did you break this down into exercises/phrases for practice?
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It’s great that you get to practice almost every day, congrats!
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I try to make practice time the centerpiece of my days. Basically I arrange everything in a way that it serves an uninterrupted practice. It helps that I (un)fortunately could not care less about my carrer as such. 
I reduced my molecular biology degree to a mere tool for generating income, nothing more. The only thing I struggle with is the out of the box part of the sessions. Not being fresh “upstairs” (I get up at 4:15 am to be able to hed home at 2 pm) makes it really difficult and it doesn’t help that I have this bad message ingrained in me that “I am not good enough to play my own stuff and besides there was no musician in our family so there is no way I can be good at music” blabla, you know the drill, I talked about it in my introduction…
BUT! The method works! I do not know how different I sound from the outside (I think the difference is audible, unfortunately I did not record myself when I started), but from the inside, I feel like I have made immense progress. The one note per string was the toughest on my right hand and I can feel that things are going with way less effort than a few weeks ago. Eventually it will result in sounding better too. 
Also, having posted some vids of myself playing a few licks on here had a tremendous impact on my confidence. When I can rest enough to think fresh, I even have some moderate success in improvising. Simple, diatonic stuff, but it still works. I even thought about posting a vid of myself doing some Aeolian stuff I did related to the 7Factors “stop on chord/triad tones” excercise. For comparison: 5-6 years ago I felt uncomfortable playing simple Metallica songs I’ve been paying for literally 10+ years when someone else would hear it…
Knock on wood, but I feel like I’m in a positive feedback loop know and I expect some sort of breakthrough, both mentally (it’s already happening) and playing - wise.
So thanks @kiko and thank you Guys!
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Fuck. That’s legit. How long have you been playing?
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Giorgio
Yep, i do two extra workout on tuesday and thursday just to focus on bendings and vibrato
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Well… it’s been a lot of time now but with many stops. And this method is helping to get in shape and to be more focused on what i do on guitar
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Wow, nice. It would be awesome if you created a topic to share what you’re doing for your bendings and vibrato practice, a lot of guitar players have troubles with those.
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I guess I’m not part of this majority of guitar players lol. When I started playing (well… The first 5 years), I listened to a lot of 70’s rock/hard rock/metal and my playing was very blues-oriented… So bendings and vibrato (to a certain extent) became my strong points (my weak point being alternative picking and anything that involves precision when picking more than 2 strings at a time).
My advice for getting better at vibrato and bending is to try to imitate David Gilmour’s solos as best as possible (and Chuck Berry’s for 1 step bends💡) . Just the solo in “another brick in the wall part 2” is already a good exercise in itself for improving bendings and vibrato.
BUT… The art of vibrato has its diversity. Steve Vai talks about that in one of his videos. Anyone can manage to be good at one or two specific kinds of vibrato but being able to be good at ALL kinds of vibrato takes a skill and a patience that I don’t have. For example, trying to imitate Brian May’s style of vibrato takes me too much concentration, it’s completely different from Dave Gilmour’s vibrato and It’s too hard for me to do it instantly.
I also must admit I have difficulty doing bends in the higher range (can’t do more than half steps on the first string) and I can’t do 1 and a half bends if I’m not playing on light or extra-light gauge strings. But “being good at bending notes” to me, is being able to find the precise note (equivalent to the half step or whole step note above… Or down, if you practice “dropping bends” or “reverse bends” I don’t know what it’s called but I can do that).
A good exercise for this is to slide from one note to another and then to imitate this “shift of notes” by bending the note instead of sliding.
And something that has also helped me is to use the major instead of the index to bend notes…AND the ring+major (I learned that from trying to play Chuck Berry’s solos).
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I do that too! Also, I use my tuner pedal too: do the bend, when I feel like its OK I hold it and check the tuner. Or if I feel like its suspect, then check the tuner and correct the pitch
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