Original lesson: Vai Made Easy by Ben Higgins

My first REC ever!!!

Hi George, how are you? I copy here the same comment that I've given you at the mentoring program.

Great to find your video playing this GMC lesson. This is a good choice to start. There are a few things that you need to work on this one to be able to master the take. These details will need special attention and you'll have to focus on 1 at a time to get used to them.

The first thing that I note is that your bending needs some adjustment. You are letting the note sound and then adding the vibrato, that's ok! but your vibrato is not going natural with the groove of the backing, and sometimes it's a bit irregular. This is not a dramatic issue but you need to pay some attention to it and maybe practice over the original lesson to emulate Ben's vibrato rhythm and width.

The second issue that I note is the apparition of unwanted noises here and there. You need to be sure that you are muting all the strings that you are not playing. The lower strings can be muted with the palm of your left hand, the higher ones can be muted with your left hand index finger (as a bare). The closer strings to the one that you are playing is usually muted with the same finger that is pressing the played fret.

Finally, there are some timing issues in some section, for example when you play the slides at 00:36. This can also be adjusted by workin on small blocks over the original lesson.

Ok mate, please let me know if these feedback is clear and if you have any question.

Keep on the hard work!

Hi George, welcome to the REC Zone - it's great to see you playing this lesson.

I think you do a very good job of this. There's only two main issues that need immediate attention.

- Timing: In many places, you rush ahead a little too much. Your timing is generally good but you tend to speed up too much when you play anything complex.

- Muting unwanted noise. As Gabriel said, you can mute with your picking as well as using your fretting hand index finger to cover the higher strings so they don't ring out. I talk about using your hands to mute on this section of my course

http://www.guitarmasterclass.net/ls/Dealing-With-Distortion/

Hopefully you'll find it useful. Keep up the good work!

Hey George!

You did a lof of good with this lesson and the things we point out can just make it sound even better. Timming is the obvious one, Usually we are able to get best timming results, once we've learned the lesson so well, that it essentially comes right from our muscle memory. This makes us able to feel the track with our full focus.

Unwanted noises is an issue that we get familiar with, mostly at the moment we begin to use distortion. As you can notice, open string and neighbour strings can make a lot of mess under the notes we want to let ring. In practice it means we have a lot more work to do with removing those noisess, than just playing the note itself. You need to use your right palm, flat side of left index finger and a tip of any other left hand finger to mute both - strings below the one you play and string above.

Pass: 6.7