Skip to main content

Day Seventy Eight (Year Four)

Didn't have a ton of time to spend in the studio today, but I found it interesting that, a day after I posted about a record that had gotten somewhat lost in the shuffle, I found a pile of magazines that had experienced the same fate. 

I've got two music stands in my studio.  One is a tabletop stand that sits on my worktable that is usually holding whatever it is I'm currently focused in on, and the other is your regular, run of the mill, black music stand that has spent the last six weeks holding whatever didn't really have a place yet when I first started setting up the studio.

Tonight, as I went to grab the notebook that holds my song ideas from the last year or so, I noticed that, directly underneath it were a few magazines I've picked up in the last few months that must have wound up there because I brought them into the studio and just needed somewhere to stash them.  At the bottom of that pile was a DVD and booklet from Guitar Techniques (still in the plastic wrap it came in) on improving your blues rhythm.  I remember buying it, thinking that it would make a good addition to what would become the blues section of my lesson binder.  Somehow finding it tonight, as I've spent the last few weeks more focused in on the blues, just seems fitting.  Didn't take the time to mess around with the DVD tonight, just glanced through the examples in the booklet.  Seems like fun, though, and I'll definitely take the DVD for a test run tomorrow.

Got through the 4th lick of the week in Guitar Aerobics.  Today's lick was almost identical to last Thursday's except that it focused on the top four strings as opposed to the bottom four, and used upstrokes instead of downstrokes for the strumming.  I like the fact that this book is trying to improve my playing from both sides.  It continues to be a good challenge.
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