For my initial assessment this year, I decided to perform another guitar cover from a band I love, this time we have The Beatles and my cover of George Harrison’s 1969 song “Something” from their iconic Abbey Road album.
One of the highlights here for me is my strumming and sense of rhythm for most of the song, this is a piece which switches up the strumming patterns at a fairly frequent rate so keeping tabs on what I’m doing with my right hand was a challenge but one that I feel I overcame for the most part. I am also pleased with how I change chords, particularly the pace at which I do so. This is an attribute of mine that has been steadily building over time and here is a great song to show that ability as we have quick changes as well as multiple barre chords being used – I still struggle with these at times but here they didn’t cause me much worry.
This is my favourite cover to play so I always look to improve it. One way I can improve that is by building onto the little riffs; the two I play here in the bridge are taken from Paul McCartney’s bassline and are meant to fill what could be empty space in a simple acoustic cover. They are both relatively basic walkdowns – one from Ab to E and the other going from A to D – but this isn’t something I’m proficient in so it was shoddy to say the least, with practice I am sure I can work up to performing them without dead notes and messy timing. After the bridge we have the final verse progression and I only went round once when I should’ve gone round twice, a simple error to fix for next time.
Overall I am pleased with my playing and where I am at with this song; I love playing it and it showcases the best of my abilities as a guitarist. As an aside, I managed to get a copyright claim on YouTube so I must be doing something right if the algorithm recognised the song being played for the full duration of the video. Moving on, I hope to work on more songs at this level so I can expand my repertoire but, for now, I’m happy.
Targets:
- Become a more confident performer, to go beyond simply playing an instrument and start truly performing with an instrument.
- Evaluate using video and audio recordings to save time and add variety to my portfolio.
- Gain fluency with my instruments, such as understanding certain mechanics and principles.