Woodshed Wednesday: Excerpt from "Spheres"

Musicians sometimes talk about "woodshedding" or "hitting the woodshed". This means a focused and purposeful practice session, often times intended to refine one's playing of a specific song or musical phrase. With my "Woodshed Wednesdays" posts, I'll share with you some of the things I'm working on, including challenging excerpts from my own songs.

To start things off, I want to share with you a short excerpt from my song "Spheres". This little lick comes in at about 1:03 and it is one of the more challenging parts of the song. I'll do an update later with some close-up video (update... video now available below!), but for now, here's the tablature for the lick (click to enlarge).

Crash Course in Tablature Notation

If you're unfamiliar with tablature notation, it's actually pretty easy. The two musical staves above represent the same musical information. The top staff is a traditional treble clef lowered by an octave, and it shows all the usual stuff: key, time signature, repeats note duration and rhythm. The bottom staff is tablature notation. There's little in the way of time, duration, or rhythm in tablature, but what it does convey is the combination of string and fret number for each note listed in the top staff.

The top line of the tablature staff represents your thinnest string and the bottom line is your thickest string. Each number represents a fret number. So for that first note, it is the thinnest string at the 15th fret. The rhythm of this lick is easy because every note is the same length. If you're new to musical notation, including tablature, fear not! Every Thursday I'll be posting a new lesson on music theory, and we'll be covering the basics of both traditional and tablature notation. As a guitarist, I'm a huge fan of tablature notation, so you don't need to worry, all of my examples will have both traditional and tablature notation.

Back to the Lick

The lick uses all 6 strings, and in several spots I skip over adjacent strings. String skipping can make any lick hard to play evenly, so to help even out my own playing, I decided to play the lick entirely with alternate picking. This means every odd numbered note in the sequence is a downstroke and every even numbered note is an upstroke. Alternate picking is the best way to get a nice even rhythm, especially with faster licks like this, because your picking hand just has to focus on the smooth up & down motion.

Alternate picking can trip you up with transitions like the 5th note of the sequence to the 6th note where there is a downstroke on the B string followed by an upstroke on the D string, skipping over the G string. There are numerous instances throughout this lick where a string skip happens in the opposite direction of the alternate picking flow. The trick is to start slow. Try mastering just the first 8 notes. Once you get that, move to the first 16 notes, then eventually the full 32-note sequence -- then try playing the whole thing 4 times in a row.

Use a metronome and set it to as slow a tempo as you need, making certain that you're playing each note in the sequence evenly. Focus on the alternate picking, because once you get the hang of it, you'll be able to introduce quick acrobatic, string-skipping lines into your own licks with even fluidity.

Update! Here's some video...


Have Fun Woodshedding!!!