Tomo Fujita Guitar Wisdom

Thanks to everyone who joined today!

Tomo highlighted some details in the Blue Monk melody that are often overlooked:
1. Fingerings (changes the tone)
2. Counting (makes space)
3. Body movement (helps with timing)

Feel free to share your notes here - your thoughts and questions add so much value to the learning experience.

Let's keep going!

Thanks much Sammi. Love the session so much!

Sorry for tons of questions. I wanted to extend a bit on the dynamics practice part. Tomo has detailed on the "soft" picking routine in a good number of videos - I get that it is very important. However, I wonder, for those "special occasions" or where it demands the player to play louder, how do/should we practice and when should we start doing so? [EDIT: the only scenario that calls for special occasions may be just a few notes in a piece - I don't know.]

I am asking this because essentially dynamics is a range of volume levels (including touch, etc of course). If we can "accurately" expand the higher volumes, it may mean that we have more to play with (e.g. giving contrast to the audience) - or it's just my imagination and that we should just turn up the volume knob and picking/playing too hard in general just don't give good tones (?).

Hope it makes sense.

Hugo

Thanks for the livestream today! We appreciate it and the extra time. There’s a lot to uncover in this one. Like the idea of starting over on this lesson and trying it from the beginning to see what we missed the first time. One thing that stuck out was being flexible. Eight notes counting in first half. At the five chord can count quarter notes. Moving your body to keep good rhythm. Watching out for note duration as well. Amp set up. All and all great lesson with a lot of information so I need to rewatch. Look forward to reading everybody’s comments.

Jeff

Great stream today! I need to go back and watch it again.

Some other interesting takeaways:
• The thumb is always moving
• Great improvisation ideas to be found in:
• Playing the phrase backwards
• Same notes but a different rhythm
• Playing phrase in a different direction
• Skipping notes
• Knowing 10 or 12 songs (deeply) is enough. Expand those songs into other ideas.
• Match Tomo’s fingerings to keep the phrase smooth

Darn! I was so excited to have the stream on Saturdays and I missed it :( I'll watch the replay but live interactions are so much fun!

That was very interesting live stream. I like the GW triads with glasses.

One thing I noticed is that how you count is important. If you count straght feel blue monk would be verv boring song. However if you coumt triplet feel or swing feel this song could be very interesting.
Like moving body, count 1&2&3&4&, using swing feeling.
Eiji

Yep. I have the notes down. It's the timing/counting that I really need to nail now. It's always something...lol

Thank you so much guys! I am so happy for having you all here at GW!

Tomo

I hope everyone is digging into their Blue Monk practice and not annoying their spouse, roommate, or neighbor :)

Due to the number of threads about Blue Monk and the amount of supplemental videos Tomo made to help GW peeps, I decided to create a playlist containing ALL the Blue Monk-related videos.

Here is the link:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPa9BlYMYrS5KAFtvR7xtIoKatmmUcnoz&si=yMI_jyKC1GV7pcTk

This is unlisted - so you can only view it if you have the link. In other words, you will not be able to find the playlist on Tomo's YouTube channel. I recommend "saving" the playlist so it's easy for you to access on YouTube.

I hope this helps centralize the info being shared and serves as a great reference.

And if this is the first post you are reading about Blue Monk, I've included context in the description pasted below:

This playlist gathers additional Blue Monk videos Tomo recorded in response to Guitar Wisdom student questions. I’ve collected them here so you can easily reference specific ideas as you practice and work through the tune.

Topics include melody details, the R–3–7 Bb swing groove, the Bb blues soloing etude, dynamics, fingering and muting, metronome practice, picking volume, and general practice approaches. These videos originally came from several forum discussions.

While students have shared questions, ideas, and progress across multiple threads, the main discussion has developed in the “Blue Monk Challenge” thread, where many students have posted practice videos and shared their experiences working on the tune. If you’d like to explore that conversation, you can find it here: https://tomovhxtv.vhx.tv/forums/general/75939-blue-monk-challenge

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns! I'm here to help :)
Sammi

This is really helpful thanks Sammi. Appreciate the attention on this one and organizing of the direction , repetition and follow up. Thanks Tomo and to one of our members Eiji on showing us about blue monk! I think his video helped a lot