Skip to main content

Day Thirty Six (Year Four)

After getting a bunch of other stuff done during the rest of the day, I finally had a chance to sneak into the studio tonight for about an hour and a half.  Still working on getting the CDs put away, but I'm getting closer. The floor space is opening up.  Which is good, because once the music is done, I get to start organizing all of the magazines and books that are currently boxed up in the closet.

Getting to the resources will get me back into the binder for the last week of the #START Experiment, and it will be a good way to get back to what's really important (and has gotten a bit lost in the shuffle, what with the move and all)... the playing!

One of the things I really want to focus on while we're living in a bigger city, with what I hope will be more music opportunities, is getting some acoustic stuff worked into shape and playing some coffeehouse gigs. Maybe some solo electric stuff, if the right venue is out there.  That notion has been a bug in my ear for a long, long time... dating back to seeing Paul Westerberg pull it off on a Leno performance.

I'm just excited to improve as a musician, and to have the luxury of a good space in which to learn. I'm really hoping that not having to have the "music room" be in the middle of the living room will be as much of a help as I think it will be.  It's been a long time since I've had that opportunity, and I'm looking forward to taking serious advantage of it.

My journey back has been a winding one so far, and while there are things I wish I had done differently in the last four years, it makes no sense to beat myself up over times past.  All we can really do is learn from our mis-steps, our failures, our struggles, and keep on persevering.  

As always, more tomorrow, and better!
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