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Day Forty Eight (Year Four)

Sometimes the biggest steps are the hardest to take.  I took one tonight that I've been pondering for going on six months now.  I sat down in the studio, made a list of all the recordings from the hard rock record I had worked on in bits and pieces with a friend of mine from back home from 2005ish until early last year, burned all of the tracks onto a CD, and pulled them off of my recording gear.  As hard as that was to do, it needed to happen.  Here's why:

1) The project was (obviously) never going to be finished.

2) Subconsciously, I feel like it has been holding me back.  Not necessarily from the demos I was working on most recently, but just in general.  It seemed like, as long as it was there, I'd keep drifting back to it and beating myself up for not finishing it off.  With everything I've learned about myself and accomplished since the beginning of Round 1 of the #STARTexp, it has become increasingly obvious to me that I need to focus more on the positives, and spend my energy on something that can get done in the now, as opposed to semi-obsessing over something that should have gotten done years ago.

3) It just feels like, new studio space, new beginning, is the right attitude to take.  So many musical things to focus on right now:

1) Lesson Binder
2) Practicing
3) Songwriting
4) Investigating the Local Scene
5) Teaching (sometime in the future)
6) Listening

I know that regret can be a driving force, but I don't feel the need to beat myself up over it every time I walk into that room.  I feel like I'm at a point where I can take the experiences I've had, and channel them into whatever comes next without having to sift through all those old recordings every time I sit down to write.

Strange post tonight, I know.

Tomorrow's big goal is to sit down with the lesson binder and all of the resources currently fighting for inclusion, and see if I can't set myself up a plan to start making serious progress with my playing.  As the job search drags on, I need to make as much of the open opportunities I have for music right now, because I know that if I don't, once I get a job, I'll feel badly for not spending more time in the studio.
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