Not Dead Yet

Well, I ended up taking an unexpected two month break from guitar. A bunch of things were going on and I just lost a desire to play. Thus, my "Road to Freaking Awesome" ground to a halt. A little over a week ago, I got the desire back. I've put down sweeping for a moment and have been learning George Lynch's solo on "Breaking the Chains." It's relatively easy for a Lynch solo, but requires lots of precision bending. I'll be getting back to the sweepy goodness soon.

Fatsort

We just got a sweet new Pioneer deck installed in our car. The problem is that if you have music on a USB stick, it plays them back in the order they were saved to the device. Touching the files won't help. Thankfully, an enterprising soul developed Fatsort that will reorganized the file allocation table on a FAT32 or FAT16 device so that things will play in the proper order aka alphabetically. Very cool and easy to use. I heart the OSS community.

Four String Sweeps

I started working on four string sweeps today. The good news is that I seem to be picking them up more quickly than I anticipated. I suppose now that my fingers are more used to sweeping semi-properly, it's only a matter of adding an extra string. Hopefully this isn't a one-night phenomenon.

Exercise 10 Clip, Take Three

I know I've been working on exercise 10 a long time, but I felt that there was no point in moving on until I could play it in a way that sounds not too terribly unlike sweep picking. So here it is; tell me what you think. Exercise 10, March 11th edition.

By way of comparison (and so you don't have to scroll back through the blog), here's what it sounded like on February 24 and February 21. At the very least I think you can hear a noticeable improvement. I think it's time to move on!

Exercise 10 Clip, Part Deux

Here's another bash at Sweep Pick Mechanics Exercise 10. It's definitely getting smoother. I wish I could play the whole progression like I played the first sweep. My main issue now is getting my hands in sync for the beginning of the sweep so the notes aren't quite so cut off on some of them. Nevertheless, progress!

Exercise 10 Clip

OK, here's the first semi-decent clip I've been able to get of me playing Sweep Pick Mechanics Exercise 10. Some of the notes don't ring out as clearly as they should and there is a minor mistake at the end. I hate it when I have an otherwise decent take only to screw up at the end.

Exercise 10

I finally got myself to sit down and take a crack at some new exercises in Sweep Pick Mechanics. I have been practicing exercise 7 all along and have it down pretty smoothly. Today I mapped out exercise 10 and began working on it. I can get all the patterns in the right order at the right fret, but it is by no means smooth. The good news is that it is now all a matter of patient repetition. I hope to post some new clips soon.

Android Screenshots in Linux

I've been helping a friend of mine beta test an Android application. A couple of problems I found were easier to show than explain, but Android doesn't have a built-in screenshot capability. I found this page that made things much easier. I already had the Android SDK installed and working. So I just needed to create /etc/udev/rules.d/android.rules with this line in it:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE="0666"

Once udev was restarted and I enabled USB Debugging Mode on my phone, I could run the ddms utility with the Android SDK and get all kinds of cool info on my phone, including taking screenshots.

Delay of Game

The holidays took their toll on my practicing regimen. Unfortunately, once I get out of it, I have a hard time getting back into it. I'm still practicing, but not with the consistency that I should be. I hope to rectify that starting, well, immediately. I practiced for a while just now. I forget how much I like my Jet City JCA20H when I haven't played in a while. You *can* practice an electric unplugged, but it does seem to miss the point.