Skip to main content

Day Sixteen (Year Four)

So, the email for the second round of START went around today.  We got to pick our groups, and share at least one of our risks.  It begins on Monday.  What I'm risking is two-fold, and perhaps a bit tougher to measure as the weeks progress, but whether or not I am successful will be painfully obvious at the end of the 24 days:

1) The Lesson Binder.  People who have been following me for a while know my struggles with the creation of a lesson binder.  I'm tired of having it sit unfinished (and at least somewhat unSTARTed).  This 24 days is just the kickstart I need to really get it done.  As an added bonus, I think moving in the middle of this will almost help the process, because it will force me to go through everything as I put it all away in Dubuque.

this leads perfectly into my second risk, which is...

2) Setting up the new Studio Space!  I've ranted here over the last few months about how excited I am to finally get my recording gear out of one corner of the living room and into its own space.  Can't wait to have a room to be messy and musical, to listen and to create, to build up and break down, analyze and improve.  With all of my resources and all of my CDs in one spot.  With a table big enough to really work at.

I'm a bit concerned that those goals don't offer the kind of noticeable progress that my recording of 3 songs did the first time around, but the only way to grow is to risk, right?  And it's called the Start Experiment, not the Finish Experiment, so as long as I get somewhere and don't lose momentum after the 24 days, I'll at least be in a better spot than I was when I began.

Knowing me, I'll keep working on the stuff from Round 1, too, so get ready, it's going to be another EPIC 3 weeks of blog posts.  Probably with before and after photos of studio stuff.  Make that definitely.
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. I wasn
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 and grind to
Post a Comment
Read more