Day One Hundred Three

So, I started in on the "classic song" thing today... well, okay, I sort of did. My intention was to start with "Stairway," but I wound up getting distracted by the riff to "Rock & Roll" instead. Granted, after that happened, I did mess around a bit with "Stairway."

Something else I'm discovering about myself: I'm doing better with this when I have a tune that I'm working on, something I'm working toward. This may seem obvious, but what I'm really getting at is that, at least lately, when I sit down to practice scales, I don't get much done. When I work on them in the context of a song, I have more success.

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Day Two Hundred Twenty Seven (Year Two)

So, the new Springsteen disc is amazing. There's enough of a mixture of his upbeat rockers, his ballads, and his message songs to make this his best record since The Rising . And speaking of that record... Buying The Boss the day it comes out always takes me back to a specific moment in life. It was July 30th, 2002, the year after 9/11, the year after someone on the streets of New York told Springsteen "we need you now." I had driven to Oshkosh, WI to visit some friends, when I remembered that Springsteen's disc was scheduled to come out that day. I drove downtown to The Exclusive Company, but had to park a few blocks back. At the time, there wasn't much going on downtown, but when I got out of the car, I could hear this music coming from up the block somewhere. The closer I got to Exclusive, the more it began to dawn on me, they had set up a giant set of speakers in their upstairs windows, and were blasting the new album out into the streets....

Day Two Hundred Twenty Six (Year Four)

So I dove back into 100 Riffs tonight, going into it with the hope that the hand written tabs I did last night would help me unlock the issue I was having transitioning from the first half of the riff to the second half. It worked. With both halves clearly written in front of me, I was able to work through the transition that had been tripping me up when the screen cut off was happening on SoundSlice. That's going to be a nice thing to have in my bag of tricks for the times when I get stumped figuring these things out. I played a little bit of acoustic tonight as well, trying to be better about finding the balance between both instruments. Late 90's-early 2000's rock has come up a lot in conversations at work of late, so in that spirit, I picked a song from that time period out of my set list notebook ("Your Winter" by Sister Hazel), and took a quick look at it. Admittedly, it's a song I had mostly learned a long time ago, so the essential parts of it w...

Day Two Hundred Thirteen (Year Five)

Finally! A really good day. And one that I really needed after the frustration with the rest of the weekend. I took a step back from a few things today, and got what I hope will be a bit of clarity in the process. Instead of worrying about the progress I really haven't been making on the EP, I told myself that I needed to be happy with the few bits of lyric I stumbled across today, and that maybe I needed to focus my attention elsewhere, at least for today. I had picked up a really cool book on music theory as it applies to guitar last Tuesday when I was out and about, and having spent a little bit of time paging through it over the last few days, I focused in on it tonight and started reading, taking notes, and reinforcing some things. It felt like progress. It was great. When I had worked through some of that, I moved on to the whole "100 Riffs" thing, and got myself moving on that again. It's astounding how much I can get inside my own head a...

"Muse" - ings on Rock & Life

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