Tomo Fujita Guitar Wisdom

I'm working on the "Two, two" piece (in 2/2 time). I was tempted to rush through it because I'm so excited to learn the key of G, but actually it's just as tricky as anything else in the book. I find those changing rhythms can throw me off. So, I did lots of practice without the metronome, just counting out loud.

Last weekend I went to a garden party with lots of Latin pop music and suddenly I heard it as 2/2 time. "boom-cha-boom-cha / boom-cha-boom-cha"

How is everyone else doing?

I just finished up the duet on pages 10-11 and now moving on to the review and learning the "E" sting on pages 12-13. slow and steady. I try to get to the book at least 2x a week while working on other aspects. Glad to hear you are not rushing through. And yes, so exciting when you are learning something then get to hear it played out. Ever since I started the guitar, I cannot listen to music the same. Always trying to figure out the timing or hear the chord changes etc.

Just saw this thread and am definitely interested in joining you guys, unfortunately, I'm still on the first page but we'll see if I can catch up any. I'll be posting some practice videos on the forums once I get my pace with the book, which as someone else mentioned is slow and steady but I'm really loving learning to read music and Tomo's tutorials are awesome.

Hi Evan,

Welcome! there is no need to catch up since you can't really predict how long each exercise will take. All you need to join is post in here about your progress. :)

Progress: "Two, two" pg 28 is now up to 40 bpm. Haha, it's going to happen.

Jean-Michel Moreau

29 days ago
Hey E M Pool how is it going? Does the book make your music stand collapse under the weight? ;)

Hi guys, I'm a bit behind as had a small back injury so I was out of action for a month or so. Book is still open on page 1, I will need to apply some discipline, going to make a start on it tonight, I shall report back!

@E M POOL Good luck! I hope you back heals up well.

Good news bad news. Good news is that after 6 months of looking, I found a job. Bad news is I probably can't practice as much guitar. :) Haha!

Progress: Two, two is up to 50 bpm and I started G major. It seems like the biggest benefit comes from reviewing old material.

You can always make time for guitar! I'm not excited for the fall semester to begin but, I've fallen in love with music so I'll have to make time! I've made a lot of progress on the first duet, sea to sea, its been coming along slow but I'm finally getting to the point where I can play the whole song. Just crazy how different it all sounds just a few weeks later, noticeably more familiar and comfortable, really loving it. Also been learning some really just amazing music theory, and memorizing the fretboard, and building scales from notes and from patterns is also just fun. I'm excited to start making my way through the book faster and faster as I go because I can feel the foundation paying off!

Progress: up to 53 bpm on "Two, two". I'm finally getting the hang of 5th string root R37 chords, and I'm doing the key of G at ~ 60 bpm.

About practice time, I'm taking little 5 minute breaks between meetings to do things like the chromatic warmup, or to play one song.

In the evenings, when I have a night free to practice, I'm doing 15 each:
- "two, two"
- first page of G
- and review.
- Rhythm 365 book

It seems to work okay for this current phase of life. :)

Hello -- I am also working through the book. Thanks for setting this up Jean-Michel!

I'm currently working on the "Here we go again" duet in the early pages of the heavy book and going back and reviewing the earlier exercises. I I'm definitely taking it slow and considering the details. I have had to check myself a few times and go back because I was rushing through the exercises. It feels good to put in the work, and I have fun with the many other lessons -- right now I'm working on triads triads triads...and triads. Also triads...and memorizing the fretboard :)

Hi everyone, I'm new to the group. I see that it would be interesting if we created a Hashtag # on Instagram where we all upload our videos, publish our progress and collaborate with each other. What you thing guys?

So I made a Discord. I don't actually know what I'm doing, but here is the invite.

https://discord.gg/qsNhb4aD

We could post clips for mutual reviewing feedback and encouragement if anyone is interested in that

I had a chance to play around with discord. There are a few limitations, but it could be a promising tool if students were inclined to collaborate.

It's not really a great place to upload a video and ask for feedback. The video size is 8 megabytes and it's pretty difficult to make anything as long as 60 seconds and trim it down to that size.

It is probably easier to upload an instagram reel or tik tok or youtube short and just drop off a link in a text chat channel and ask for commentary there. Of course your video is then about as Public as it could possibly be, because the entire world can see it on those platforms-- the exception being youtube where at least you can make your video "unlisted" instead of public. But, these days, maybe everyone is okay with everything being public.

My feeling is Discord would be better suited to doing either live demos or as a guided practice based around each of Tomo's Leavitt videos.

As a live demo platform it would be sort of like a good old-fashioned "recital". Go to a audio/video channel at some appointed time and perform your piece live and wait for a flurry of accolades and good job stickers! Of course to get feedback (and stickers!) you'd have to schedule a time and notify your audience of Tomo Guitar Wisdom peers. Suddenly it's like you're at work trying to herd cats... err, I mean schedule a meeting. People would have to commit to visiting the Discord regularly and often.

However, I'm guessing not many people here are burdened with an excess of free time (or retired old codgers like me) and can drop everything and go watch a performance or demo any time of day or night. Or hang around, lurking in an app, waiting to chat with other guitar geeks.

I think it would actually be better suited for treating each of the Leavitt videos like a classroom session.

There could be one voice/video channel and one text chat channel for each of Tomo's Leavitt videos. And there are LOTS of them!

A player working through the pages for, say, the first duet for Sea to Sea, could go check out the text chat, see how many others have worked through it, see if anyone is stuck on it, ask something about it, and announce the intention to work through it. When you completed it, you come back and say, hey, I did it, or say, dang, I'm stuck, I can read single notes, but not 3 notes at a time ... or whatever the hang-up is.

You could then go to the voice/video channel for that video and see if anyone is in there. This is where it could be interesting.

You could ask someone to play it for you. You could share the lesson video of Tomo playing it and all watch it together, sort of like a watch party, only everyone is playing along (on mute of course!) After the video is done you can all hang around like you're on Zoom and talk about it and decide if you're good with it or you have to go practice it 10 more times on your own, or whatever.

This still will require savvy Discord users. Like, maybe, actual Berklee students.

Further, Discord has the capability to provide intelligent agents. Maybe there could be an agent, or "bot" as they're known, that will start playing the video as soon as 2 or more people enter a video channel. Maybe there could be an agent that can make it easy to schedule a watch / play-along party. Maybe there could be bot for a weekly planner or todo list.

This would require savvy Discord administrators or power users to set all this up in the server. Maybe even... a dreaded "management team". All I know is I don't know how to do it, I just watched a few of the youtube videos that the smart kids post about how cool Discord is.

Anyway, this is already a long and rambling post. My takeaway is that it's like Slack. If anybody is a Slack guru at work or school , they can probably become a Discord guru pretty quickly. Like all software tools, it's very flexible, so lots of users have to commit to using it in order to find a good way make it a productive tool that leads to more practice and better study performance and not just an extra time suck, you know, like TikTok! (or Slack) :)

And with all that said. If Guitar Wisdom itself had a way to schedule a Watch and Play Party with live chat for the existing videos here on vimeo -- and if I could cast them onto my big screen living room TV, that would be more than enough team collaboration for me! Much simpler! Less like going to work.