Quote:
1- I want to be able to play in jazz and rock styles, and play in a band if the opportunity arises
2-Varies, as little as as 15 minutes, or as much as an hour and a half
3-I can play Another one Bites the Dust by queen, and a few Police songs.
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Hey
Thanks for posting your goals, here's some advice based on that. Please bear in mind that this is MY advice only. Others will give you different advice - you need to find a path that will take you to your goals AND suits your personality.
To achieve what you've listed as your goals, the method that I would advise is this:
1) Do basic work on your technique (both left and right hand) to meet the technical demands of the genres you want to play in - this need not take more than 10-15 minutes a day, and in 6 months to a year you'll have a basic technique set in stone to build on (PROVIDED you do it right of course)
2) Apply left and right technique to a series of progressively more difficult songs. The songs you've listed that you can play are a great place to start - head over to my website, click on the '50 songs' tab and you'll find a list of 50 songs that go from this level to far more complex. If you worked through that list at the rate of a song a week, or a song every other week, by the time you get to the end of the list your playing abilities will have come on in leaps and bounds.
3) To start with, concentrate on working through a list of progressively difficult songs (whether my list, or a list you come up with yourself based on what YOU like to hear). After you've been doing that for 6 months or so you need to start thinking about the 'theoretical' aspects of what you're doing - what chords are being played, what scales are used to provide note choices when playing over that chord, rhythm, time, etc).
This is to ensure that when you get to the end of the 50 songs as well as having taken your playing up several notches you also UNDERSTAND how to play your own lines so that if you're in a jam scenario and someone says: Let's play THIS song (and you've never heard it), provided someone tells you the chords you should be able to come up with a genre appropriate line - lots of guys learn to play loads of songs but never learn how to play songs they haven't got the tab for. (SIDENOTE - learning to play walking basslines is a great way to learn how to do this - Ed's Friedland's BUILDING JAZZ BASSLINES is the best book I've personally seen for this - there are others out there but I've not seen them all).
4) Get a good teacher! (Very untrendy advice in some circles).
Here's my definition of a good teacher: Someone who'll listen to what you want to do, and come up with a teaching plan to get you where you want to go, in the way you want to get there .
My definition of a bad teacher: Someone who teaches as a gig, is only really interested in the money the gig pays, who teaches (without thinking why) scales and arpeggios...if you do go to my website you'll see some of my stories about this!
A good teacher will save you time in the long run by:
(i) pointing out technique problems that will hold you back when you get faster
(ii) sharing their knowledge/experience so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel
(iii) Give you encouragement and support on those days when you want to give up/feel crappy etc etc.
Hope that helps - if you want more info don't hesitate to PM me, send me an email, or post here!
Cheers
Paul
