IMPORTANT NOTE - Week 4, Friday 25th

Hi guys, I hope you have all been practicing "Forever" and enjoying your time in the MYT class. I just wanted to give you a heads up that we are thinking about not making this Friday our last Friday since a lot of the instructors will be out of town for Bible Teachers Training.

It is not official yet so keep practicing! :) The plan for this Friday is to practice together with the bass class. Also, we're thinking of splitting the class into 3 groups of 5 (or so). And then the following week for the last class, we'll have 3 songs to perform! The songs we're thinking about are Forever, Blessed Be Your Name and Give Us Clean Hands. All familiar songs so hopefully this news doesn't cause too much stress.

Alright, well I'll keep you posted and feel free to ask any questions about those 3 songs.

Week 4

One more class left! Great job. This week, let's focus on playing "Forever" by Chris Tomlin. The best way to break it down is to go through the chords until the changes become almost second nature. Then, practice the strum...and then add them together. Once that becomes easier, then you can even try singing along =) If you want to listen to a song, there are a bunch of different versions on Youtube.

Fingerpicking

Here's a video from James regarding finger-picking. It's quite instructional and will be useful for when you guys practice it.

Session #3 - 7/11/08

You guys are doing great...I can tell you're practicing! =) Hopefully by the end of our time together you'll be able to play some songs on your own for your personal worship. Here are some things to practice this upcoming week:

1) I gave you a few chord progressions in class today to practice specific chords within different keys. I'm going to write them below. Start w/ 4 downbeats and decrease until you can do each chord per downbeat. You can actually switch the order of the chords within the same key and they should sound relatively ok. That's another way to practice.

(key: G) G C D Em D G
(C) C F G Am C Dm G F C
(A) A D E A
(D) D G Em A D

2) Prax either Hosanna or Give Us Clean Hands. Start w/ practicing chord changes, then add in the all-downbeat strum, and then try to add in the praise strum w/ some singing! =)

3) BARRE chords! These are very difficult. Shoot for being able to play F#m and F. It will actually take more than a week to get this to sound good. Keep trying until you can get each string to sound clearly.

4) Practice through the chords of As the Deer. We will use this song to learn finger picking next week.

I know this is a lot of HW. Prioritize #4 because we will be using this song next week. I'm just giving you the others in case you have spare time and also to give you stuff to work on when the class ends.

Great! Btw, if you want to play a song and have not yet told me, please let me know!