This is my final week to work on this project. Honestly, I'm surprised and proud of myself for getting this far while balancing school, family, and personal things along with learning this solo that I was very uncomfortable with. I started out with being overwhelmed and foreign to Van Halen's playstyle. Now I'm still overwhelmed at some points, but I expect it which makes the experience a whole lot better and makes it easier for me to pick up some of his new concepts. I'm happy with the progress I've made, but I also know that I could've done a lot better time-wise. There were times when I could have been working on this but I chose to wind down and not stress myself out. Don't get me wrong, it's a good thing that I didn't concentrate all my energy on this, but I could've been doing this instead of something less productive.
In short, though, I don't think I will be able to learn the complete solo. I am still having troubles with the tremolo picking and the part before the tapping section I've heard is very complicated. So, my plan is to get the tapping section down first and then perfect the tremolo picking. I have already started on the tapping section and ironically it's the easiest part for me so far. Even more ironic is the fact that it's only really "easy" for me to play when I do it fast. This is also the section that I enjoy the most because, well, it sounds the coolest. The only trouble I'm having with it is moving my right hand at the right times in correspondence with my left hand. I should be done with this section by the end of today, and that will give me time to work on the tremolo picking and possibly the really difficult section. To show that I learned the solo, I'm planning on putting a video of me playing it on the slideshow. If I can't learn the part before the tapping section in time, then I'll play up to the end of the tremolo picking section, then cut the video, then show me playing the tapping section. I'm not proud of the fact that I couldn't learn that one part, but before I started this I never would have thought I could get even halfway through this solo, let alone dang near every part of it. Have you ever tried something new, and you think it's going well, and then you just hit that wall where it's getting more difficult to make efficient progress on it? Well, that's where I'm at. As mentioned before, balancing school and this is difficult, but when I do get the chance to work on the solo, it just gets harder and harder when I previously thought it would be getting easier because that's the trend that the rest of the solo was taking. Ironically, it's just getting harder and harder.
I have just managed to get the tremolo picking down, and now I'm just working on getting the phrases up to speed. The picking is up to speed, but the phrases that Eddie plays aren't- yet. The phrases that I'm talking about are basically a series of pull-offs and hammer-ons going down the fretboard. They're pretty easy patterns to get down, but the speed part and sliding my hand down to the next spot correctly in time is the difficult part, but working on it should smooth it out. Another annoying thing that happens to me is my hands sometimes just lock up or I know what comes next, but my left hand just freezes on the fretboard. It usually takes me telling myself over and over again in my mind "I'm gonna play it all the way through this time" for me to finally make it through. It's a weird psychological thing that I hope will go away as I approach the end of the solo. I think with splitting up my time wisely I'll be able to finish up this section of the solo and move onto the last parts. The very last part is the tapping section, but the part before that is some weird section that people actually call the hardest part of the solo. I described it in one of the previous weeks, but I'm getting more and more nervous that I won't have enough time to finish it all entirely, so maybe I'll just move to the tapping section first and then learn the basics of the weird part before it. |
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