I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent practicing the guitar over the years. After you get to a certain point, you can pick most things up pretty quickly. However, every so often you’ll run into something that really challenges you and is unlike anything you’ve ever played before.

In recent years, I’ve been writing most of my guitar parts without the guitar in my hands. I mostly compose by ear and notate the parts and then turn around to figure out how it would be played on the guitar. I started doing that in order to get away from being bogged down by playing habits in the writing process as well as to channel a more pure inspiration. This has opened up the opportunities for much more interesting guitar parts, but it also can pose an interesting challenge.

Without having the guitar in hand while writing for the guitar, you will come up with some very interesting parts – but, every so often, you’ll run into something that is incredibly difficult to play. This is what happened when I wrote the 8th Micro Caprice out of my series of 10 Micro Caprices I just released.

There are two parts of Micro Caprice no. 8 that are unusually difficult, but one was so strange that I worried at first that it would be impossible to play at tempo on the guitar.

I always spend a great deal of time working on the most optimal way to play a part on the guitar and, in the case of one small section of Micro Caprice no. 8, the most optimal way was still ridiculous to play.

The funny thing is, you’ve probably seen the video and didn’t even notice it. It happens so fast. Take a look at the video and pay close attention to what happens at about 32 seconds in. Take a moment to look at it and then come back and I’ll explain what’s going on there.

What you are looking at there is one arpeggio segment ending with a tap with the picking hand. From there, the 4th finger of the fretting hand is tapping on the 6th string to start off the next arpeggio. The 4th finger is then barring down to the 5th string which is where the picking hand begins sweeping again.

That tiny transition gave me more trouble than anything else I’ve written or played on the guitar in years. But, with all that trouble, the difficulty of it is nearly invisible it goes by so quickly. So why even bother?

Now this whole section here seems to be everyone’s favorite part of the composition, and it is also my own. So I had a lot of motivation to practice it really hard and get it down – and that’s precisely what I did. When I finally was able to play it at full speed, it was incredibly satisfying. I’m very glad I put the time in.

While there are a lot of interesting challenges in my 10 Micro Caprices, this part was the most difficult for me by quite a wide margin. But, I’ll tell you what, it’s a fantastic feeling when you start working on something that seems impossible but you push through and prove to yourself that you can do it. That is something I can’t recommend enough.

Grab a copy of my Extreme Neo-Classical Micro Caprices 1-10 and give yourself an epic and inexpensive challenge!

Dan