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Day One Hundred Twenty Five

It felt good to get back to the Zeppelin today. I stubbornly started with the beginning, and worked my way through some of the bridge. The opening went really well, considering that I've been away from it for a while, and as for the bridge... that went smoothly too, if only because I actually focused in on what the music was telling me. I stopped worrying so much about where my fingers were going and just reacted to it, and surprisingly, it started to resemble Zeppelin.

Four months into this, and I still can't get over how even the smallest bit of playing makes my hands feel good. Progress may still be slower than I hoped it would be, but it feels like progress by god! Having the last two days off has helped to clear my mind a bit, which no doubt helps. Creativity is so often stunted by having too much on your mind, and yet at the same time, it's having all that on your mind in the first place that puts you in a spot where the music can help you process. It's a bit of an odd catch-22, but I understand it, or at least I think I do. Oh well, off to play some more before passing out.

One last thought before I dash off here. It dawned on me earlier today that, when it comes to learning scales on guitar, I never really got the training I should have, in part because I played violin growing up and my early guitar teacher just assumed I had made the transition from scales at the shoulder level to scales down in front of me. While I had known this for some time, it dawned on me that the way to fix the problem was to go back and focus on it from a violin perspective. When I was in orchestra in high school, our conductor would throw a random scale at us every day for warm-up purposes. It may not have been fun, wondering what it was he would come up with, but it was an effective way of making paranoid students know their scales backwards and forwards. I think, if I start with the majors (and think a little bit about old violin fingerings), that I can start to untangle years of ignoring the way it all ties together. Then, with the knowledge that any other scale either contains additions or deletions from the major scales, I can start to piece the rest of it together. Why it took me this long to make the connection, I'm honestly not sure. It might even help to find the violin the next time I'm home and drag it back with me... although god knows when that will happen.

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