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tfw you play something you half-know on keyboard and realise it spans just over three octaves and many of the intervals involved are very close to a perfect fourth and you go 💭🎸❗️

been spending a few hours now trying to nail the iconic first few bars of [song] and i love how trying to learn to play some known material fluently on guitar is a mixture of practice and problem-solving, making gradual improvement both in skill and in strategy through repetition

oops playing with a consistent rhythm is very important when practicing. i keep forgetting i should try to play slow consistently before trying to play fast…

my dreams will be haunted by the sound of a continuous loop of the song i am practicing played at 50% time in the macos default general midi soundbank piano with metronome on

練習する、練習する、練習する、

もっと少し練習するぞ、後少し練習する、練習する、練習する、ずーっと練習する、練習ぅぅぅぅぅぅぅぅぅぅ

okay, enough teasing, here's an okay-ish recording of what i've been practicing the better part of three days now

i must have been a masochist to pick [rot13]qver qver qbpxf sebz znevb fvkgl sbhe[/rot13] as the first song i seriously attempt to learn on guitar but it's great fun

my arrangement takes some artistic liberties of course:

• i dropped the held G on the right-hand part when the left-hand part repeats
• the shiny high-pitched two-note chord is one octave down because the strings just ring better like this

the biggest limitation however, which i first realised today (😅), is that the lowest note of the chord in the ninth measure (not played here) requires a note outside of standard eadgbe guitar tuning

…but you know what it's not outside of? drop d >:)

time for me to get metal

of course after realising that i also realised that the song is probably straight up easier to play in drop d in any case because all these bass parts happen to be nice barre power chords in drop d… i think. i didn't actually try tuning down my guitar yet. that's for tomorrow :)

i switched to drop d, which does accomplish what i wanted, but now that my thumb reaches down three strings rather than one or (occasionally) two, it's tempting to thumb the rest of the notes, which is an unexpected difficulty

…and now my guitar's tuned to drop d i'm going to have to adjust the action and intonation a bit to compensate for the drop in string tension. i'm gonna have to commit to the bit! well, this guitar has humbuckers, maybe this is what it's made for?

@hikari Ah, a fellow person of taste, I see

I also tend to drop high parts down on octave, if not the whole thing, because lower strings produce better sustained notes when played unplugged and I find a lot of high notes a bit too shrill and less forgiving if not fretted + plucked just right

@hokaze in the case of this particular song i just felt the lower octave sounded more true to the original; those notes ring out beautifully on the fm piano and the same octave on guitar would be too muted because i'd have to go past the 12th fret ^^;

@hikari This might be in part due to me also practicing a fair few video games songs at like half speed recently, but this was definitely recognisable without needing to check the rot13 to confirm

And yeah, not the hardest iconic VGM but hardly the easiest either, you need to use most (if not all) of the strings, most of the frets are nearby only to then suddenly jump miles away for the high notes, ideally there's some chords for emphasis and either a delay or reverb or some effect to get the right vibe of that level's ambience as a rhythym guitar line to backup the lead

Nicely done! I really should buckle down on getting one song somewhat consistently (even if simplified and chordless) instead of constantly trying out new songs ^^;

@hokaze i think the rhythm of it is quite challenging for a beginner also, especially with how you have to do fast hand movements at the fastest moments and how many of the notes are between rather than on beats. it is still 4/4 common time though!

@hikari Guitar is the Celeste of musical instruments?