Skip to main content

Day Three Hundred Thirty Six (Year Three)

Taught today.  My student was a lot more focused this week than she has been for a while, which was impressive to me.  We covered a lot of ground, and I ended up giving her a lot to work on in the next week.  One of my favorite moments of the week got a chance to happen tonight: while my student was unpacking her guitar and getting her stuff in order, I had a minute, maybe two, to sit and play with whatever chords happened to be underneath my fingers at that moment.  Tonight it was a progression that had the capo at the 7th fret.  The back story here is simply that we had been taking a look at "Here Comes The Sun" last week, and so that seemed to me like a logical place to begin.  Anyway, I found a cool sound in an A minor shape that led into a G chord.  Another one of my patented flashes of something that has yet to be fleshed out in a concrete manner.

Played a bit of electric tonight, too, once I got home.  It was nice to have both the acoustic and the electric in my hands on the same day.  Felt like that hadn't happened in a while.

Got a few other, more mundane, things done tonight as well:

1) Imported the Springsteen, Tom Waits, & Drive By Truckers from Saturday.
2) Went through itunes and pulled up some of the missing album artwork.  Not having that stuff as squared away as I possibly can bugs me sometimes.

For an exhausting day, I still felt like I got at least a couple things accomplished.  Hopefully tomorrow is a quicker day, with more time at the end of it for rock & roll.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Day Two Hundred Six (Year Four)

Today was the first official day of the second half of my "album-in-a-month" challenge. As for today's goals, I wanted to see what I could get done in regards to track order, and get at least a little bit of a start on the lyric writing process. I spent more time working on the track order question than I did on the lyrics today, but as a result of that, I ended up with something that I think will work in terms of order. I did sit with the notebook for a few minutes at the very end of the day, and got a solid starting line of lyric and some other ideas that I hope will be jumping off points for lyrics. What I'm thinking I might do, however, is switch my focus from the lyric writing part of the process directly to the recording part of the process.  That way, if I can get the music recorded and burned onto a CD, I can take the music with me in the car, and listen and try to see what images and thoughts the music brings up.  It's a tactic that has worked for...

Day Two Hundred Ninety Two (Year Five)

Today was the last seminary village cookout of the year. While we were all sitting around the picnic tables eating dinner, I got a chance to talk with a few of the Mrs.'s classmates about guitar related stuff. As it turns out, more than one of them wants to be more proficient on guitar. I'm not saying that this will lead to more teaching opportunities, but I told one of them that I would throw a folder together for them. Essentially, anytime I get a chance to talk shop is a great chance for me to reinforce some of the things I have been focusing on. If nothing else, it gets me thinking ahead to tomorrow's day off and a chance to get into the studio for a decent amount of time.

Day Three Hundred Forty Two (Year Four)

Tonight was a slightly unfocused night in the studio. It was a night of acoustic stuff, but most of what I got accomplished involved tinkering with different songs by Jackie Greene and Johnny Cash.  If nothing else, I set up the next list of songs I want to figure out. Tomorrow night I need to start getting back to the Acoustic Goldmine book, as well.  Every time I sit down with the acoustic for an extended period of time, I reconnect with the emotional side of that instrument.  There's so much to learn still in that book, so much information designed to improve my playing.  I need to take better advantage of it. I know it's crazy, but I'm already looking forward to Friday.  I really need to spend a lot of the day in the studio.  Getting a weekday off of work is such a rare commodity.  I need to do a good job of using my time wisely.