Practise diary week 7
Today in music we decided to play Layla as our next ensemble performance piece. This song uses interesting chords progressions and jazzy sounding such as 7th chords. These were a a little challenging at first due to the finger position of the chords. The song also has a key change which makes the song more interesting to play. The lead guitar work in the song is very bluesy and fun to play and i actually already knew the main lead melody part. The song ends on a duel lead guitar solo that me and another student play and this gives this part of the lead guitar parts a call and response feel to it. This week we also decided to work on solo performance pieces at home as the class felt that we could do this at home and in school focus on the ensemble pieces as what easier due to meeting up at of school and other situations.

Practise diary week 3
In our music lesson today we decided to play 'Superstition' by Stevie Wonder for the next ensemble performance piece. Since there are three guitarists in our class i volunteered to play bass on this song and i set my self the target of trying to play with my fingers instead of a plectrum. This is more challenging as it is something i have never done before but i felt fingers sounded netter that a pic.

Practise diary week 2
Today in music we worked on adding more keyboard parts to the song to make it more unique and to fill out the sound. We also decided to end the song differently than the original as we felt it fitted the song better and also challenged every student as we had to learn a new part..I had also now learned to the guitar solo and worked on playing it in a whole band situation. We ran into a few problems at first during the guitar solo as we released we were playing the chord progression slightly wrong be we rectified this and the solo now fitted into place with there rest of the song.

Practise diary week 1
Today in music we had to chose a song to perform for our ensemble performance coursework and we chose to play 'Dani California' by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. I already know most of the song on guitar except the guitar solo. I set myself the target of learning the solo in my own time for the next lesson. The solo involved many different techniques such as hammer ons and pull offs and lots of vibrato. This pushed me as a guitarist as i had to practise my string bending and build up speed during the fast licks used in the solo. Also the song used lots of barre chords and this was something i had to work on as it wasn't just the major chord shapes so i had to work on my finger positions for different types if barre chords