Skip to main content

Day One Hundred Fifty (Year Two)

So, a couple of days ago, SL sent me a link to a blog post by Jon Acuff.  He wrote a great book called Quitter about how to get from your day job to your dream job.  This blog post of his got its genesis from much the same place as my own blog sprung to life.  He posted on his birthday about how great he was at starting things, and about how not-so-great he was at finishing things.  Then he issued a challenge to the people who follow his blog:  make a "finish list" of things you want to get done in 2012, and follow up/through on it.  After thinking about it for a couple of days, I'm doing this.

Here's the link to Acuff's post.  http://www.jonacuff.com/blog/the-hardest-part-of-a-project-is-also-the-most-important/

And here's what I'm certain is going on my list:

1) The record with B.

I'm tired of looking at it not being done.  I'm tired of waiting on other people.  If I've got to refurbish a currently defunct laptop and find ProTools, then so be it.  The steps involved in that can be steps involved in getting this project to where I want it to be... in a CD case on my shelf.

The beautiful part of this is that I know my playing isn't where it needs to be for the serious lead-work that will be required of this project.  I will really need to step up my practicing in order to get my playing to the right point.  I've spent so long fighting with the two sides of this blog... the band side and the practicing on my own side, that it has slipped past me that, in order for both sides to be effective, they need to play off of each other.

In short, I'm tired of making middling progress on both when I know full well I ought to be kicking ass on both, and I'm going to do whatever it takes to boost my practice time (hopefully closer to that crazy 50 hour number than they are now), and start moving toward something I can be proud of.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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....
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more