Join me in my blog as I go on an adventure into writing songs, learning new guitar tecnniques and skills and playing guitar parts that are out of my comfort zone.
I'm an 18 year old aspiring singer/songwriter. I have been performing gigs on my own since i was about thirteen and then my band formed when we were just fifteen and have performed together constantly since then. I have always played well known covers in the rock, indie and britpop genres at my gigs, I'm a confident rhythm guitar player as i'm able to change to different chords efficiently. But over the course of this blog I am aiming to learn some solo's, scales and elements of theory.
Project Goals :
For my first goal of the project I will write, compose and complete a new song from scratch with plans to then record and produce for my solo EP.
My next goal is to learn and be fluent with the minor pentatonic scale as I'm a beginner with any scale.
My last goal of the project is something i've wanted to learn for a while and now I can finally focus on it for a reason, that goal is to nail the guitar solo in 'And I love her' By The Beatles .
Frank Turner is an example of somebody who has made a good living from being a hardworking performing singer/songwriter. Turner is an English singer/songwriter from Hampshire and has released 8 solo albums and 5 EP’s. Frank has been gigging since the young age of 16 and has now played over 2100 gigs as a solo artist, he chose to play his 2000th gig at the iconic Rock City in Nottingham. His goal like most successful musicians I presume was and still is to sell records, gain respect and a loyal fan base, this has been achieved by touring the small uk venues relentlessly in his early playing days and gaining fans from the back of those shows. Frank wrote a lot of his songs with his friends who have also gone on to be successful musicians in 'The Vaccines' and as 'Beans on Toast'. I think by surrounding yourself with other talented people it can help you thrive as you can hear their opinions and gain their support. Frank Turner also won 'Celebrity Mastermind' in 2013 and his specialist subject was the rock band 'Iron Maiden'. Most recently Frank has been active and using his status to raise money for the grass root music venues that have been hit most hard by the effects of the Covid 19 pandemic. He has raised over £250,000 over a series of livestreams on facebook and youtube which is incredible, I watched most of these online shows and really enjoyed them. I have recently been reading one of Frank's books 'Try this at home', it's all about how he wrote his songs, it's got in there the story and writing process thoughts of all his biggest and most loved songs. I've found this very interesting and I'm hoping it will give me some incite and a new approach to writing some of my own songs.
This is one of my favourite all time songs and i've always wanted to play the solo in the middle of the song. After a week of learning it i have made great progress in memorizing where the notes are. I think listening to the song and playing along with it is a very effective way of becoming confident with the song, i tend to do this with a lot of songs i wish to learn and so i've used this method to my advantage.
Until recently I have never really been interested or even attempted to learn any scales on guitar. I now know that learning guitar enhances my fingertstyle guitar playing and hopefully after more frequent practise learning solo's will come much more natural and familiar to me. I hope learning these scales will make my Beatles solo performance much better.
I found the pentatonic scale easily straight from google images and i followed the tabs. It didn't come as a big challenge to me as i can follow standard tabs so it just took me a few repetetive round of the scale. I started off slowly and gradually built it up to an efficient speed, i still think i could play it a lot quicker and for longer with another couple practise sessions.
This goal of learning scales is relavent to one of my ideal job careers which is a session musician,
I hope you like my first recorded attempt and stay around to find my progress interesting.
Hopefully this will have another verse and more structure by next week to be on course to complete this part of my songwriting goal for the blog.