Tuesday Advice Corner (because I missed a few Sunday's...)

Hey everyone, sorry that I missed a few weeks on this. Here's what I hope is some good advice. 

1) A riff might be hard to play because it's not arranged well. By this I mean, the fingerings and specific placements of chosen notes might not be the smoothest or most efficient. For instance, there are several different spots on the neck that can be used to play the same middle C note. Think hard about whether the fingerings in your line cause you to reach for a note that is actually available in a much closer location. Avoiding having to jump all over the place / make position shifts might make playing your line smoother. There's more to say on this and I ultimately want to make a YouTube video on this subject. 

2) I've been messing around with approach tones lately. These are cool, super jazzy. Basically, you can approach your colour tones in a chord with diatonic or non diatonic notes a semi tone above or below. Because your colour tones are so strong, a quick out of key note isn't going to sound bad. In-fact, this will actually add some nice flavour. For example, if I was going to play a C major 7 arpeggio, it would sound great to slide in to the B note from a Bb. A warning though, doing this is a really cliche smooth jazz thing to do, but it's worth exploring that sound to see if you like that idea or not. 

3) The best way to learn something is to implement it into your writing. Learn a new concept? Attempt to write something that utilizes that concept. That's how I've always done it. 

4) Adding on to (3), a good way to develop mechanical proficiency is to challenge yourself by writing parts that you know are hard your to play. That's the great thing about math rock  all of the riffs and ideas are so technical that everything can in some sense, be hard to play. 

5) Your phone is a good musical tool. If you don't do this already, know that you can download free apps that can serve as a guitar tune, theory trainer, ear trainer, sight reading helper, recording device, camcorder, etc. Phones are just amazing in this regard!