Guitar progress

In my Making Lemonade post, I wrote about how I decided to spend the majority of my remaining time on sick leave playing the guitar, and what I material I decided to learn and practice.  So how did I do after about 5 weeks of playing the guitar full-time?

Increasing repertoire

I memorized "For All We Know" and "My Funny Valentine" from the Galbraith book, and "We Three Kings" and "Away In a Manger" from 335 Christmas.  Hand me a guitar anywhere and I can play any of these 4 from memory.

I'm close to memorizing "Darn That Dream".

I've started learning "Alone Together" from the Galbraith book and "Silent Night" from 335 Christmas.

Not much progress to report on the two Stevie Wonder tunes - "I Wish" and "Overjoyed".  The bass line with the chord stabs in "I Wish" are just hard for me.

Why is repertoire such a big deal for me?  I just want to be able to play songs on a guitar, without accompaniment.  My initial inspiration was being at a party where seemingly everyone else was able to play a complete song on an acoustic guitar and when it was my turn, I didn't know any songs.

Another reason is that if I want to play jazz, I need to know real jazz tunes.  By working on these chord-melody arrangements of jazz tunes, I can learn how to play the tunes, and also expand my knowledge of chords/harmony at the same time.

Reading standard notation.

I prioritized repertoire above all, so I didn't work much more on Cello Suite #2 since the earlier post.  I know where that high D is on the 1st string now, at least.  

I've been using a pick to play this music and it's been fairly easy, as long as I avoid ending up with a note on my first finger and having to play the next note somewhere lower on the neck than that, or some other similarly awkward position.  I'm not that concerned about developing awesome picking technique on the guitar, but it's nice that I don't seem to struggle much with reading and playing this music, which helps as the ultimate goal is to memorize this piece so I can play it on the viola once I'm done with my post-op recovery.

Two-Handed Groove Guitar skills.

I was able to learn some of the basic "drum" skills - how to do a kick drum tone by slapping fingers or the picking hand thumb on the lower strings, how to do a snare by pulling and snapping a string, etc.  I was also able to learn how to play simple bass lines by using just the left hand (I'm a right-handed guitarist).  Where I struggled was combining a Latin bass line and a really simple kick-snare drum pattern.

After a slow start, I can now do the Latin groove at about 75% of the speed of the playalong video.

I'm still figuring how what roles the guitar will take in my music after I've recovered enough to play my bowed instruments.  I think rhythm will be a major factor, whether I play along live with a sequencer or two, or just sample the guitar into Octatrack and play guitar samples on the Octatrack.

Creative Arpeggio Design patterns.

I liked the sound of the arpeggios Tim Miller was demonstrating in the introductory video for this course.  The "modern" sound of these arpeggios reminds me of Allan Holdsworth and keyboard players like Chick Corea - not a sound I'm used to hearing out of guitar players.

The unusual fingerings and picking approach has made this material a challenge, but I've gotten some cool ideas that I look forward to carrying over to my bowed instruments for improvisation and/or composed lines.