Skip to main content

Day One (Year Four)

Day One, Year Four.  Man, oh man, does that look weird.  Can't believe that I've been doing this for four years now.

What's interesting to me is that, all these years (and a few swift kicks in the ass) later, I'm finally starting to see exactly what it's going to take for me to get where I want to be as a musician.  I'm sure that, if you went back to the first week of posts for each new year, somewhere in there would be a similar statement.  The differences this year are the Start Experiment, the knowledge that I've got someone in my life who supports and encourages my music, and if we're being totally honest, the fact that, inside of a month, I'll have a space solely dedicated to the learning and pursuit of music.

Okay, on to the Start stuff.

1)  After I posted last night, it bothered me so much that I hadn't found that backing track for "That'll Be The Day," that I turned on a bunch of lights in the living room (where I was almost positive it had to be), and just started going through stuff until I found it.

2)  Having gotten at least a little bit of the way into looking at drum sounds last night, I sat down tonight around 9:30, and got to work sorting out the rest of it.  Initially, my plan was much like last week's plan: to figure out the sounds and the order and then call it a day.  Sure enough, I was tired enough at the point that happened that I could've packed it in and felt justified at being in the same place I was last week at this time.  Then it dawned on me that, if I just went that far, I'd wake up tomorrow feeling behind for the first time all week.  And I wasn't about to let that happen.  So I pushed on through the tiredness, and didn't stop working for the night until I had the drums programmed in and recorded.  That means I'm caught up.  And I'm ahead of my schedule from last week.

Other things of note today:

- I taught a really good guitar lesson.
- I started in on The Blessed Unrest by Sara Bareilles.

Indeed, year four started with the bang I was hoping for last night.  More tomorrow, and better, as always.
Labels:

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