A couple years ago I decided to learn guitar. I had played a little as a kid, but never practiced and had zero understanding of the instrument. I found Nate's video on 3-note-per-string 2-string navigation of the fretboard. That, plus a short video on the circle of fifths, made it all click. I bought Nate's lesson pack from another site, and then got too busy to practice for a year.

A year ago I forced myself into a regular practice routine, ramping up from 15 minutes a day to an hour or two a day, 15 min to 30 min at a time.. I split my time between electric and nylon. I was comfortable focusing on scales, theory, and technique, but mom wanted to hear a song. I figured I'd better learn at least one song for nylon and one for electric. Mom's a sucker for Bach, so I picked "Jesu, joy of man's desireing" for the acoustic and "Violin Sonata 1" for the electric. "Jesu" turned out to be lot harder than I originally thought... once I figured out the notes were supposed tor ring out and I needed to pin my fingers it required a whole new level of finger independence. And the violin sonata turned out to be better suited for economy picking and required a lot of attention to muting string noise.

I recently applied the "100 Challenge" to legato, and in one week have gone from 0 to 110 bpm 8th note legato on the pentatonic scale. Next up is bending, vibrato, and blues licks for electric. For the acoustic, chords and fingerstyle. I had heard that Nate had moved on and created a fingerstyle site, which led me here. Lucky me, there's a blues course here as well.

My 6-month goals include being able to improvise blues, be proficient with bends and vibrato, learn at least 5 freestyle patterns, learn the open chords, improve bar chords, I've already watched the first two modules in both the blues and fingerstyle and I'm starting to put together next month's practice routine and 100 Chellenge.

Course I hope you add in the future include: rock, metal, jazz, music theory (what is Hungarian minor?). Also hoping for a module on using wah.

Favorite artists: Buckethead, Andy Timmons, Gary Hoey, Gary Moore, Tony Macalpine,Yngwie Malmsteen, etc.

So Nate, I challenge you to challenge me to be good enough in 6 months to justify putting that underpriced Mullard-made Zaerix ECC803S tube I found into my Blackbird SR-71.