Tom Collins is hosting a boot camp this week in his Patreon group. It’s in a tuning of f#DEAD. He had a practice technique for us that I found quite valuable during and after the first session yesterday. While practicing measure or set of measures we set a metronome for timing then varied the volume or loudness of our playing but tried to maintain the tempo at that metronome speed. I have never done that exercise before and it was quite useful to make sure I don’t drift to faster when I increase the volume or slow down when I play softer. It was interesting to try other songs, exercises and measures after the boot camp with the different volumes at a given metronome speed. Especially shifting to loud and soft variations within a set of measures. I even tried moving my hand from near the bridge to over the neck while maintaining the speed.
Just thought I would share.
An additional bonus of that exercise is it guides your mind to focus on something specific -- in this case volume -- which takes your mind from other possible distractions. That may allow other skills to be internalized while you're not thinking about them, like timing, fingering, precision in fretting and striking strings, specific clawhammer techniques all of us learn and more... Sounds like you're getting your money's worth from the Patreon group.
It got very hard day 3 and day 4! I don’t memorize measures very fast and the song that he was using was pretty complex with few repeats of measures. But did learn a lot about timing, drop thumb position and movement and the f#DEAD key. And an hour per day of focused effort with a big group and a teacher is an incredible gift!
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