[Harp-L] Tools for use in the woodshed - long

[Pierre <slavio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A while ago Sam posted an entry asking people how they go about structuring 
their practice time. At the time I wrote that I had been floating around a 
lot and very unstructured and finally I had decided to get serious. I also 
wrote the following:

===========
(Part of my Oct 14 post)
So in an effort to improve my playing I recently resolved to learn one lick
a week from Tom Balls Little Walter and Big Walter book. Its not that I
really want to learn licks, it's more of a means to force myself to learn
some of the advanced techniques of the two Walters. Tom's book is an
advanced book (a great book), that is full of octaves, tongue splits,
chords, partial chords and other techniques. These techniques are key
element of good tone and variety. Anyways, to get each lick to sound sort of
like Tom's will take me 3 or 4 weeks at least initially. So I'm working on 4
licks at a time at each daily session.
=====

Anyways I have been practicing seriously for a few weeks now and my hours 
per week are increasing. About a week ago I started using two tools to help 
me get these licks right. One of them is Transcribe (recommended by someone 
on harp-l) which I use to slow down tunes so I can play along to get the 
timing right. This is a great program as you can:

Slow down a tune on the fly.
Play either left or the right channel or both
    ( Tom's CD has accompanyment on one channel and his playing on the 
other so I can select either one or both)
Play any tone
Select a section to loop
Can save or recall up to 10 loops - this saves time searching also can save 
loops settings in a file.
Transpose music
etc.
Free for a month, great program, easy to use.

The other tool I have been using is Bendometer which shows you what it 
hears. Which can either be my playing or Tom's playing which Bendometer 
'hears' from the Transcribe output to the speakers.

The two tools combined are fantastic. I can see my errors as I practice 
sections of licks. So I can fix everything before I move on.

The good news is, I finaly found a good way to practice my intonation 
without doing mind numbing excercises. Also I am upping my practice time as 
I find myself working on all the little things. Also I can see what I'm 
doing wrong and right.

BTW turns out the splits and partial chords which I thought would be hard, 
are the easy part, the hard part is the little details like intonation and 
squeezing vibrato on half notes beetween (fast) quarter notes, and bending 3 
and 4 draw partial chords down one semitone etc.

The last tool is Tom Balls Little Walter and Big Walter book/CD which is 
just great. Thank you Tom!

Right now I am thinking wow man - I'm really learning!

Anybody out there got any other tools to improve various aspects of their 
playing?

Pierre.

No affiliation...