Tomo Fujita Guitar Wisdom

Thank you Egil for sharing your video! I am sure our members are so delighted to see your practice video. Good job! I use this book for cleaning up detail techniques so it’s really up to you…. how much you are willing to dig in.

You can check your thumb position. Maybe lower position? Think about it. I see your left hand mute after chords. Great! Then you can use a little bit more right hand palm muting too. You can use a little more dynamics (after you fix a few things)

Great way to improve yourself reviwing your recording.

Could you introduce a little about your background and any feedback on Guitar Wisdom lessons (how long have you been on Guitar Wisdom) and any specific goals?

Tomo

Thank you for the feedback! Yes the thumb does look pretty high up in the video, I will try to lower it and see how it feels! I remember I used to have it really low when I first started, but that would hurt my hand after playing for a while (I probably squeezed the neck way too hard back then too) so I eventually changed my technique, but I will try lowering it a bit again! And I will work on palm muting too, muting the higher strings with my palm still feels quite awkward to me. I'm practicing maybe 30 mins a day with the book now, will try to keep it up.

I started playing a few years ago with a DVD-series that was gifted me which taught me the basics (like open chords, barre chords and actually how to read sheet music too so that wasn't completely new to me). I never finished the whole course though and for the past years I have not been practicing very seriously, mostly strummed chords and sang singer-songwriter stuff for fun (even that is very fun though!). But now I've decided to improve my guitar playing and practice again. I like having a book to work on and make progress in so the sight reading series appealed to me. I think I have had a GW account for some months now, but I didn't really start using it much until the end of last year so I'm still quite new here!

I've only really watched the sight reading lessons so far, but I think those videos are great, lots of things I wouldn't have thought about if I'd just worked with the book by myself. My goal right now is to just make it through the book I guess haha, but in the long term I just want to be as good as I can be and maybe start playing with other people since I've only played by myself. I want to learn more theory too so I will check out the theory lessons eventually.

Wow - really nice Egil!
You can post anywhere, and it might be cool to keep a personal practice thread.
If you are doing something specific, you may want to add your video to an existing thread on that topic (R37, Chromatic Scale, Blue Monk, etc). A couple reasons - one, you'll probably want to check out everything in those threads anyway for a super deep treatment of the topic. And two, your video will be easy to find for those who will most benefit (others working on the same thing).

You’re very welcome Egil! Thumb positon and use less pressure is very important. Plesae learn one string approach and triad inversions too. Great way to learn about your thumb position.
https://tomovhxtv.vhx.tv/videos/et01-c-major-scale
https://tomovhxtv.vhx.tv/music-theory-i/videos/et12-major-triads
https://tomovhxtv.vhx.tv/start-here/videos/ft01-simple-chromatic-scale-exercise-1-2-3-4
https://tomovhxtv.vhx.tv/start-here/videos/ft-grip-thumb-position-strap-4-guitars
https://tomovhxtv.vhx.tv/start-here/videos/ft-root-3rd-7th-swing-groove-technique

Thank you for sharing your experiences. Great to hear that! Please enjoy your guitar journey at GW.
So happy to hear that you are enjoying the sight reading lessons.

Tomo

Thank you Clay for suggestions and ideas around GW! Very sweet!

Tomo

Thank you! I will try my best to keep it up, doing 30 mins every day now. I have found it very useful too :)

Thank you j for encouragement!

Tomo

Thank you j! I will keep sharing my progress :)

Thank you Cruz! Really happy it was encouraging. Have you done the sight reading series? There are lots of pieces in this style in the accompanying book (Modern Method for Guitar Vol. 1). I quite like them too even if they were written mostly for a pedagogic purpose.

Just started on one song. Seems every lesson Tomo gives, I'm off for 2-3 weeks trying to really grasp the concepts, so thats on the list! :). Thanks again for the tips.

Thank you Tadashi! Yes the sight reading series has really made me much more sensitive to noise, I've improved my muting a lot. I will keep posting here, let's indeed keep encouraging each other!

No reverb, at least no added reverb, but my room has quite a bit of natural reverb I think! Thank you for the advice, I will work on it and in two weeks or so I will be back with a slower version of Etude No. 2 :)

Thank you Egil. Okay. That room has a lot of natural echo? That's why I don't practice in my kitchen. It sounds too good! I go a little bit dry sounding room so I can hear any unwanted harmonics that I can hear better. That's another reason, you want to play everything very slow!

Tomo

Haha that is a good point! Unfortunately I don't have another room except for my bathroom which has even more echo than this so I'll just have to play very slow like you said!

Don't worry! Great sounding room! Yes! Slow is better.

Tomo

Nice and clean, Egil! Way to find the goodness in going slow.

Thank you Clay!!

Thank you! Yes if I didn't move my body like this it would be truly impossible for me to keep any kind of steady rhythm at this tempo haha, it really helps a lot. I'm also counting to 4 inside my head here, I don't know if this is something people normally do but it seems to help...

And thank you very much for the advice, I will work on it!