Playing with the older stuff

Since I decided I would try to resist the lure of "the shiny", I pulled my homemade strat out of the closet for my practice session last night.

I've been staying with the same set of excercises in the Modern Method for Guitar book, slowly increasing the tempo that I'm working at, and also working on getting cleaner. I'm working through the first 10 pages this week, starting at 120 bpm and moving up by 4 bpm each night. This means that I'll be at 140 bpm on Saturday, when I'll move to the next set of exercises.

I'm really pleased with my progress so far, though I realize that I won't be able to keep up this accelerated pace forever; at some point, maybe in two weeks, maybe in two months, I'm going to hit a wall. Once I hit that wall, I'll need to slow down a whole bunch.

The strat experiment worked out well. I'm still not pleased with the intonation on that guitar, and it's just a bear to tune. However, it was pretty easy to play, and had a brighter, cleaner tone than my Gibson.

If I do indeed succumb to The Shiny, then I'll need to make sure that it has a good clean sound as well as crunchy sounds. I really liked working with that clean sound, especially in terms of figuring out how close I was to the written exercises. Sure, playing a distorted guitar is fun-- if it wasn't, maybe I'd be playing acoustic guitar instead of electric guitar. But to know if you're playing right, a clean tone is darned helpful.