'Sultans of Swing' Progress

I have started work on the ‘Sultans of Swing’ Instrumentals. They are both challenging, the guitar solo being more challenging due to the extremely fast finger picking. I am making progress with the instrumental, although I am currently finding it hard to follow the TAB. I have listened to the original piece numerous times, finding out where I’m going wrong and I have tried to correct it quite a few times. I feel that because it is only a few notes, I am having difficulty remembering it. It is much harder to memorise a few notes in comparison to a verse sequence, especially as I have learnt the instrumental with the wrong notes.

To counter this error, I have started to focus only on those few notes – isolating them from the rest of the instrumental notes. This is beneficial for me as I can play and play and play these notes until they are burned into my memory and I begin to stop making the mistakes. I have only covered the guitar solo briefly; I am not as familiar with it in comparison to the Instrumental as I haven’t had a need to reach the end of the song during my practices. I am pleased with how far the piece has come along, only just a week ago I was having difficulties with timing and now I’m nearing the end of the piece.
Below is an example of the 'Sultans of Swing' guitar solo, showing the end part of the solo that requires a new picking technique that I've been learning, it is a challenging solo.

The bottom 2 lines showcase the difficult, fast ending to the solo.

I have made a lot of progress with ‘Not Alright by Me’, I can now play the piece all the way through, and with only a few slip ups when it comes to the final sections before the end of the piece. The piece is fantastic to play, it is one of the nicest pieces I have had the pleasure to play, along with Michael Kamen’s ‘Band of Brothers Theme’, which I worked out by ear – it was a piece I considered for my solo performance but decided not to play it as I wouldn’t have a backing track and it is quite short. This piece is also a finger-style piece, except it is played on an acoustic guitar rather than my native Electric guitar. It is one of the pieces I am considering if ‘Not Alright by Me’ or ‘Sultans of Swing’ fall through.

Of course, once I have finished learning the piece that won’t be the end of practice. It will only be a rough draft of the piece, and in December I will hopefully have perfected the pieces.