Hello I'm Ola and welcome to a new segment of mine called the 14 Days Guitar Challenge.
To be quite honest, I think a lot of us players out there feel that we aren't practicing enough
guitar or even struggle to find time or motivation
to improve. The only time I even play guitar nowadays is either when I tour or when I'm
making a video, I barely play guitar any other time, so it has become some sort of tool for
me to just complete my work rather when I was young I played because I wanted to.
I feel like there's a LOT of things I could personally improve with my playing and that
my playing is rather limited. But I want that to change, I want to get back into a good
habit of constantly practicing on something cool, So that's why I decided to start this
series of videos.
The idea with the 14 Days Challenge video is that I present to you a challenge, it could
be a technique, a specific lick from a song or whatever, that both YOU and I would practice
for maybe 10-15 minutes or even 30 minutes a day for 14 days. Then after 14 days I will
present a video of my progress and urge you guys to upload yours with a tag #ola14days
so I can check it out. And then I present another lick or challenge for the coming 14
days and so on and so on. The idea is just to create a goal that we all follow, and I
think it might be easier to do if we all do it together. Or maybe it's a shitty idea that
I will abandon after two videos, but lets just see where we end up. I think if we keep
it up, it will probably help us all to become a little better players.
So for this first time I just decided to take this alternate picking lick. I've always had
a hard time getting alternate picking right, I think it's because of my weird picking technique,
so I made this little segment just to start of.
This guitar is tuned to standard E just for the simplicity we have
e b g d a e
And here's the lick played at 70 bpm.
Pretty straight forward, lets turn it up to a 100 bpm. It's all 16th notes and strict
alternate picking, so I start with a downstroke, then just down up, down up.
Ok that was a 100, lets try 144 bpm.
I'm finally kind of feeling my limit there,
The idea is to start slow and try and make it exact, if you have a metronome that is
great, use that to slowly build up speed. You start with a slow tempo and you gradually
increase the tempo. But personally I would also try and practice it at killing speed,
In the sense try and play it over my ability like this.
It's fine if its sounds shitty just like it did for me there, the trick is to get your
mind used to the idea of playing it fast. If you only practice and play at slow speeds,
you're going to be great at playing that lick in a slow pace, we also need to practice at
top speed.
It's fine if the technique isn't there yet, it will come eventually when combining
both slow and fast practicing. Is everything clear? Just make sure to practice little every
day for 14 days and we'll see where we end up in 14 days. Maybe I'll just cancel the
show before 14 days who knows...
I'm excited actually, lets see what happens. If you have any suggestions for upcoming challenges,
please put them in the comments section below. Yeah ok, see you in 14 days. Have a good challenge...
or something...
170 bpm... shit...
Oh shit, ok
190 bpm?
Shit
Ah no, I have to practice , for exactly 14 days. I'll see you in 14 days. It's going
to be awesome. Talking to the microphone...