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Day Fifty Five (Year Four)

Well, with the CDs organized, all that remained was to put the studio to good use.  So tonight, for what felt like the first time in ages, I did.

I started in with lesson #1 in the Blues Goldmine book.  It's all about the art of the turnaround, and my half an hour of playing told me more about where I sit right now than anything has in a while.  My fingers are sore, and I've got a list of a few things that have gotten rusty:

1) My barred 7th chords need a bit of work.  They're better than they were before I sat down to play tonight, but there were a few spots while I was running through some 12 Bar Blues progressions that I wanted things to sound a bit smoother than they did.

2) I need to work on switching back and forth between my rhythm playing and my lead playing.  In running some of the turnarounds, I was (again) a little bit slower on the uptake than I had been hoping to be.

The next 5 lessons in the book are focused in on turnarounds in specific keys, so my plan right now is to almost over-focus on lesson #1, in an attempt to iron out some of the kinks in my playing.

I'm keeping a better record of it all, too.  I was more detailed in documenting what I worked on tonight than I ever have before.  People talk all the time about doing "one thing a day towards your goals," well today mine wasn't so much the practicing as it was the keeping a good record of the practicing.  In some ways I'm setting things up for myself the way I set them up for my guitar students in Cherokee, with a spot that says: "For Next Time --->" followed by a list of what feels like the most important things to focus on.  The difference between the student lists and my lists is that, instead of having everything be a weekly goal, I can set a few weekly goals, and then divide the rest of the week up into smaller sections with correspondingly smaller goals.

I'm feeling really good about things tonight, and one of my small goals for tomorrow is to spend more time in the studio than I did today. 

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