Guitar Speed Picking and Improve Finger Strength

Ever motivated by great fast guitarists (watch Paul Gilbert and Shawn Lane), then it's time to start practicing and getting fingers in shape to play some strange beautiful music.

For each note to sound clearly, left and right hand synchronization is the most important thing. You'll find a few exercises in this article to improve this synchronization. It's important to understand that these practices would only improve your speed and finger strength, composing good music is an altogether different thing.

Maybe you don't want to play lightening fast guitar but learning speed picking would be a good addition to your skill set and not to mention that playing everything else would be a cake-walk.



How to hold the pick? There is no one particular method that's "right". In order to have good picking technique, you should hold your pick in the way which is most comfortable for you. All guitarists have their own style of holding the pick and you should find out yours too.

I'd suggest sticking to alternate picking if you really want to improve your picking speed.

Remember always to use a metronome. Start with 60BPM and then keep on increasing once you are comfortable with current level. Again metronome is very important and it helps your keep track of progress and as Joe Satriani also points out, it also builds your phrasing skills.
In the same video, check out the basic chromatic exercise with alternate picking (Exercise 2) and a tongue-twister for fingers (Exercise 3, Advanced).

Getting the left hand posture right is also very important to improve speed. For correct left-hand posture, watch this.

Following is a basic exercise to improve speed. Begin with, say, 60 beat per minute (4/3 division/subdivision). Increase metronome frequency only if you feel comfortable with current speed and each note is sounding correctly.

Exercise A: (Use alternate picking, d - down pick, u - up pick)

d u d u d u d u d u d u d u .....
e|------------5--6--8-------------5--7--8--------------|
B|--5--6--8-------------5--7--8------------------------|
G|-------------------------------------------------------|
D|-------------------------------------------------------|
A|-------------------------------------------------------|
E|-------------------------------------------------------|

Do the same thing in reverse order.

e|--8--7--5--------------8--6--5-----------------------|
B|------------8--7--5--------------8--6--5-------------|
G|-------------------------------------------------------|
D|-------------------------------------------------------|
A|-------------------------------------------------------|
E|-------------------------------------------------------|


To improve strength of fingers, following exercise is recommended. it improves the strength of pinky a lot. Again practice it with metronome.

Exercise B

e|------------5h6h8--------------5h7h8------------------|
B|--5h6h8--------------5h7h8----------------------------|
G|----------------------------------------------------------|
D|----------------------------------------------------------|
A|----------------------------------------------------------|
E|----------------------------------------------------------|

Exercise C (Advanced alternate picking)

e|------------------------------------------------------------------5--|
B|-----------------------------------------------------5---6---9------|
G|--------------------------------------------5---7-------------------|
D|-----------------------------6---7---9------------------------------|
A|---------------5---7---8--------------------------------------------|
E|--5--7--8-----------------------------------------------------------|

To reach the 9th fret, use the pinky and make sure that note is sounding correctly. Also make sure that you are using alternate picking even when you are changing strings. For example, pick the 8th fret on E string down and then pick 5th fret on A string up. You are basically playing all the notes in A harmonic minor scale. As done in exercise A, practice the same pattern in reverse order.


If you will do above exercises regularly, you'll certainly see a lot of improvement in your guitar picking speed and strength of fingers in less than a week. Few more cool videos: Jason Becker, Slash, More.

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Shit Happens

So I was walking by the usual tree on campus, enjoying the end of classes for the day and a nice song as usual, and it's then when the unusual unexpected thing happened. Suddenly something fell on my head, a sticky liquid. It didn't feel like a drop of water. And my worst nightmare became a reality when I looked up, which I concluded, was not a wise decision at all after watching this video.

It was only yesterday when I was complaining to a friend that it's hard to spot a bird around here. I guess I won't be complaining that anymore.

Anyway, It's all about timing you see (cartoon 5). And here, someone with a pet lovebird is worried about the food of the bird as it might be reason for dropping to be more-watery-than-usual. Thank god, bird who spotted me was not suffering from diarrhoea.

Have you ever seen a squirrel crap?

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Travel!

We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open. - Jawaharial Nehru


Whether you travel in wilderness or in unknown towns, traveling always imparts exhilaration. There are numerous positive facets of traveling.

To wake up quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world. - Freya Stark

When you travel in cities, you get to know different kinds of people and their culture. There is always something to learn by meeting different people with different philosophies and experiences. Every man has got a unique bit of wisdom which can potentially inspire you. Traveling is a great way to get rid of prejudices and narrow-mindedness. You would learn to respect all humans, no matter what their race, or social background is.


The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it. - Rudyard Kipling

If you travel in the wild, you get a chance o be close to nature which freshens your soul.
You listen to the soothing sounds of running streams. Experience things that just have been there long before humans lived. From the busy daily work-home-sleep schedule, you get some time out to think about life, things which really matter. Enjoy the natural sight of mountain peaks, sunsets, oceans. Actually, it's much more than sight-seeing, your attitude towards life can change forever.

No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow. - Lin Yutang


I might end up somewhere in Mexico.

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Installing Ubuntu from a USB Stick and Partitioning

Here I wrote about how to install Windows XP from a USB stick.

Ubuntu is an open-source operating system, available for free unlike windows. In this article, you can find instructions on how to create a USB stick to install Ubuntu. You would need a windows machine and Ubuntu ISO image to create this Ubuntu installation USB stick.

Once USB stick is ready, change the boot option from hard drive to USB Flash drive in BIOS. If your machine does not have any operating system already or if you want to overwrite the existing operating system, then during the partition operation, specify entire drive.

If you already have Windows or any other operating system and you want to keep it intact and install Ubuntu too, then you'd need to do some work. Select Manual in the partition manager. Click on the Windows partition and edit it. Create a new partition for Ubuntu, 10GB is more than enough (as music, videos, pictures etc. should be stored on Windows partition and windows partition can be accessed in Ubuntu. However, ubuntu files may not be accessed in Windows). Select this new free space just created and select new partition. Here, specify the mount point as "/". Leave everything as it is. Continue and ignore the swap space warning.


Are we human or are we dancers?

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Florida in Pictures

This post is a description of my travel in various parts of Florida in December 2008.

We left Atlanta on 25th early morning without having much sleep previous night. Our first stop was Orlando. We hadn't seen sun for a few days in Atlanta as it was always cloudy. But as soon as we entered Florida, sun was shining at it's best. No wonder, they call Florida as "the sunshine state". We reached Orlando at around 2pm and 2 of us decided to go to Disney Land while other 2 (including me) decided to catch some sleep. Moreover, we were not interested in blowing away $80 to see Disney Land. It's not that I don't like Disney Cartoons actually I am a big fan of Aladdin, Duck Tales, Talespin etc. but still $80 for Disney Land is too much for me.




On 26th December, we spent whole day at Kennedy Space Center. It was totally worth it. We took shuttle launch experience where we experienced 3g forces, I think. Basically, if you were an astronaut, you'd feel the same force. We also saw the Apollo I's control room. It was nice to see how it all looked like back then. On a different note, watch out for alligators and black vultures in the Center. Then in the evening, we watched the much-hyped movie - "Slumdog Millionaire" which completely was something we were not expecting although unraveling of the story through Q&A session was quite good.




On 27th afternoon, we reached West Palm Beach City campsite. Our campsite was on the side of a beautiful lake (I forgot the name of the lake). Sweet fresh fragrant smelling breeze was blowing. After setting up the camp, we went to see palm beach. It was awesome and felt great. I was lost in thought. We sat there till the sun went down.




We traveled pretty much all day on 28th and reached Everglades National Park. I have to say that all the while we were traveling, we got to see beautiful landscapes. Sky was as blue as it could be. Sun was shining and giving pleasant warmth. Scattered white clouds forming interesting shapes. It was just amazing. At Everglades, our camp was right there on the sea-shore. I could see some islands on the horizon. Next day, I got up at 7 in the morning and it felt good; I don't remember when I got up that early last time. That day we hiked, completed two trails and did canoeing. Canoeing was so much fun. I was the navigator and took some time to get it right. We spotted a couple of alligators floating quite close while canoeing.



On 30th, we were in Key West. Key West is basically a group of islands connected by bridges. Due to last-minute change in plans, we had to sleep in car only :). On 31st, we relaxed in sunny and sandy beaches of Miami. Here, we also met this guy named Che who was a part-time Scuba-Diving Instructor. He had traveled in more that 70 countries. He had also been to India (some places in Kerala, Delhi and Punjab) in early 90's. He spent around 6 months in Kerala working for an NGO building something recyclable (I have totally forgotten what it was). One interesting guy he was. Anyway after celebrating New Year in Miami, we headed back to Atlanta on 1st Jan 2009. It was a wonderful experience.

Oh and the song: here it goes.

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Installing Windows XP from a USB stick

Recently, I bought Acer Aspire One. It came pre-installed with windows XP but soon enough I installed ubuntu as windows was too slow and was abruptly crashing too. But later I realized that I needed windows too for some important stuff.

Now the problem was that acer aspire one doesn't have a cd drive. So I needed to install windows xp from a USB stick. After searching for a while on internet, I found this useful link. Reproducing from this link, you'll need the following:

1 USB flash drive, 1GB or larger
1 Windows XP installation disc
Assorted files that I’ll describe as we go along.

I had a 1 GB flash drive, ISO image of windows XP ( used daemon tools to mount it on virtual drive). Rest of the instructions:

Preparing the flash drive

First up, we need to prepare the flash drive.

1. Download and unzip this file, which should contain 2 folders: 1 titled Bootsect, and the other USB_prep8.
2. Navigate to the USB_prep8 folder and click on usb_prep8.cmd. This will bring up a Windows console window.
3. Press any key to continue and a PeToUSB window will open.
4. Make sure your flash drive is selected, and click start to format your flash drive.
5. When the format is complete, click OK, but do not close the PeToUSB window or the Windows Console.
6. Open a new console window by typing “cmd” into the run box in the Windows Start Menu.
7. Find your Bootsect folder (if you’re not used to DOS commands, you can type “dir” to list directories and files, type “cd foldername” to navigate to a folder name - called foldername in this example, and if there’s a long folder name you can save time by typing the “cd” and just the first few letters and then hitting the Tab key to fill in the rest of the name).
8. Once you’re in the Bootsect folder, type “bootsect.exe /nt52 g:” if “g” is the letter assigned to your flash drive. If it’s E, then change the letter to e. If it’s Z, make it z. Get it?
9. When this is done, you should see a message letting you know that the bootcode was updated, and you can close this console window (but not the other console window).
10. Close the PeToUSb Window, but make sure not to close the remaining console window yet
11. You should now see a list of 8 options in the console.
12. Select one and find the drive with your Windows installation disc.
13. Select 2 and pick a random drive letter (but not one that’s already on your PC, since this will be a virtual drive used for copying your files).
14. Select 3 and enter the drive letter for your USB flash drive.
15. Select 4 and follow the rest of the on-screen directions and you should be all set.

Installing XP on the Acer Aspire One

1. Insert your USB flash drive in one of the USB ports.
2. Power on your computer and hit F2 to bring up a boot device selection window.
3. Choose your flash drive, or if you’re using a USB optical disc drive, select that instead.
4. Select 2 for a text-based installation.
5. Make sure to delete all of the partitions on the hard drive. While you may have some success creating separate partitions on your hard drive using this method, I did not. If you find yourself with a Hal.dll or bootloader missing error when you’re finished, there’s a good chance it’s because you did not delete all of the partitions.
   
6. Create one large NTFS partition (using the quick option will save you a lot of time)
7. Follow the on-screen directions.
8. At least once during the install process, you will be prompted to reboot your computer. If you try to let it boot from the hard drive, you’ll get an error message. What you need to do is hit F2 again when it reboots and this time select option 1 for a GUI setup.

Since the link mentioned above describes the process for installing windows XP on a HP mini, the process differs slightly for acer aspire one. Once windows has booted after you selected option 1 for a GUI setup, just take out the USB flash drive (for reference this youtube video). Hopefully, windows is installed on your acer machine. Restart and check.

Once this is done, you would need to download and install drivers. For this, you would need another machine with internet as internet will not be working on the acer aspire one.

I’d recommend downloading and installing the following drivers: wireless atheros, lan intel, audio realtek, chipset intel, VGA intel, touchpad synaptics, CCD liteon (for webcam), card reader. All of them can be downloaded from here.

One useful application for controlling the fan speed in windows xp can be found here.

After all this, my ubuntu was gone. Now I need to install ubuntu again. If you plan to have both windows and Linux (ubuntu) on a machine: first always intall windows and then install Linux as Linux installation provides the option of manually partition the hard disk.

In any case, enjoy this cool instrumental version of song of hope.

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First Backpacking Trip: Preparations

I can't wait for this weekend to come and I will be gone on my first "proper" backpacking trip. I am calling it first "proper" as I have been on a few hikes in the past but all of them have been during daytime and in the night we just relaxed in our cozy hotel rooms. But this time we will be camping during the night in ass-freezing inclement weather.

This backpacking event is being organized by ORGT and there is a trip leader who is going to lead us. We will be hiking on a portion of the Ash Loeb Trail. Asheville, NC is a nearby city. We are expecting to hike about 6 miles/day. Forecast is sunny (51F High) and a low of 28F is expected. It's going to be windy which would only worsen matters. Showers are also expected.



We must be well prepared to combat such adverse climate. We must be wisely deciding what things to carry. And since we are hiking about 6 miles a day, weight must be minimized. I am excited to see my internal frame backpack provided by ORGT. We also have a stove, tents (each tent for 2), sleeping bags (0F), rain cover for backpack. There are few other important things: headlamp, water bottle (or hydration pack), swiss knife, water-proof matches/lighter, spare batteries, first aid kit, water purification method (as we will be drinking from creeks), compass, trowel (why? keep on reading).

Danger of getting a frostbite or hypothermia is always there. We have been told to ask ourselves the following 3 questions regularly: "Am I cold? Am I wet? Am I hungry/thirsty?" and if the answer is yes to any of these questions fix the problem right away.

Another important factor in wilderness backpacking is clothing. Getting wet and cold can very easily put us in serious danger. Cotton is very bad for hiking as when wet, cotton retains moisture and absorbs body heat. So NO COTTON! Lightweight moisture wicking polyester is the best choice for shirts (base layer). One should wear a fleece over a shirt which serves the purpose of insulation by trapping warm air around body. To keep out wind and water, a jacket should be worn over the fleece. Hats are also very important as a great percentage of body heat is lost through head (check this out). Other clothing includes pants (water-proof), boots, liner gloves, insulated gloves or mittens.

What else is needed for survival? Food. To save time during day, we will just be eating protein bars and snickers. Also it has been advised that eating fats is good in such conditions. For dinner, water will be boiled and poured into some frozen food: hopefully dinner will be ready in 5 minutes. One cannot expect to cook splendid dinners in such cold weather where you don't want to take your hands out of the gloves.

Apart from harsh weather, there is a continuous danger of being eaten by bears. No kidding. But fortunately, in this part of US, you only find black bears (no grizzlies) who don't really attack humans. In any case, on any confrontation with bears, we have been told to scream and act as huge as possible. Bear would run away in all likelihood unless you are standing in between the bear and its cub.

We are almost prepared now. But why are we carrying a trowel? Trowel to dig holes and do you-know-what-i-am-talking-about. After completing the operations, one is supposed to fill back the hole and extra care must be taken to keep the holy trowel tidy. Also, don't forget to put a cross (or some sign which your group has agreed upon - accidentally we have decided to use a cross. so now you know what you would get if you start digging a cross ) so that nobody else end up finding the hidden treasure. And also be sure to go in the direction of downwind so that campground should not stink. (More entertaining stuff on hygiene)

You might be wondering why I am putting myself in such an adverse condition in the first place. I will write about that after returning from the trip. For the time being, just quoting from Bear's blog:

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving in an attractive well preserved body; rather to skid in sideways, body thoroughly worn out, covered in scars and screaming “yahoo! What a ride!

I need to report at ORGT at 8AM SHARP on Saturday morning. It's quite a challenge in itself as I don't remember when I woke up that early last time. Anyway, I will be back on Sunday night.

That's too much of talking from my side. Enjoy Police-Walking on the moon.

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Someday

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore, 
There is society, where none intrudes, 
By the deep sea, and music in its roar: 
I love not man the less, but Nature more, 
From these our interviews, in which I steal 
From all I may be, or have been before, 
To mingle with the Universe, and feel 
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.
-- Lord Byron

I dream when I would be on a motorcyle 
with a backpack driving through the most exotic 
places in the world,
enjoying nature and music, meeting new people
and cultures, learning new ways and arts. 

I dream. Someday.

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