Skip to main content

Day Sixty Nine (Year Four)

Another night with time spent in the studio meant another day of feeling like I'm getting closer to where I want to be!  I'll be the first to admit that I'm still a long ways off, but having somewhere I can go to focus my energies has been everything I hoped it would be when we moved.  Now that things are set up and functional, however, I'm noticing things that will make the process easier.

1) A timer.  I had bought a small clock with a timer in it when I was living in WDM, but somehow it never ended up being used for its intended purpose.  Well, now I need to use it so that I make sure to get to everything I want to get to in a practice session.  I'm finding that, if there are four things on my musical to do list for the day, I'll get around to two of them, but not the others.  If I'm going to improve at the rate I'd like to, I need to be getting around to everything (or at least more than half of everything) on my list each day.

Take today, for example.  There were four things on my list.  They were:

1) Lick #2 in Guitar Aerobics
2) More work with the DVD booklets I pulled out last night
3) "Ledbetter"
4) The Blues Goldmine book.

I got through the first two items on the list, but the last two didn't get touched.  Some of that stems from a need to get into the studio earlier in the day than I have been.

2) The need for more time.  Some of this ties in with getting into the studio earlier, but while I've been making strides the last few days (few weeks, really), I really noticed tonight that, just about the time I was really starting to feel like I could settle in for a long stretch of practicing, it was time to blog and get ready for the day tomorrow.  Even with all of the progress of late, when I find myself getting tired at the end of a long day, I feel like I'm letting myself down by short changing my goals.

It was a good day, music-wise, but also a day where it was clear to me that, while progress is being made, there is still a long road ahead.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Day Three

Short one today. I've got a bunch of the DVDs that Guitar World has put out. Waded through those to see what I had, worked off of the lead guitar one. Just basic scales , but still a light place to begin. It was nice to just start loosening up my fingers again. Off from work tomorrow, so hopefully I'll get a lot of playing done. Said I'd mention the other project I'm hoping to finish this year. Back when I was living in WI, I started a hard rock band with a friend of mine. She was heavily influenced by Evanescence, and so, with her as vocalist, we started writing songs. We had written and demoed almost a full album's worth of music by the time I moved to IA, and had even purchased a P.A. in preparation for eventual gigs. We never did find a permanent drummer or bassist, so our demos sound very rough (and not nearly loud enough). I'd like to finish those songs, and make an EP of the 4 or 5 strongest, just as a way to put a cap on that project. More tom...

Day Three Hundred Fifty Seven (Year Seven)

Today was okay.  It ended up being quieter than I wanted it to be, but I got in a few things. 1.  I got the music from the car hauled in and sorted out in advance of my road trip to Dubuque for a little longer than a day.  I'm taking the Radiohead reissue with me for that, since I haven't gotten a chance to sit down with it yet. 2.  I'm also taking an empty notebook along with me, in the hopes that I might start to get some lyric ideas down on paper while I'm gone.  I watched some cool videos early this morning about the idea of writing all of the music before writing lyrics, and the way things are going that is looking like what's going on with me. 3.  I wish there had been more playing today, but I'm still feeling good about where things are sitting.  This next week needs to include a lot of writing.

Day Three Hundred Sixty Three (Year Three)

Well, the second run of 8 days (i.e., the second song out of three) begins tomorrow morning.  I'm pretty sure that I've got the chord progression written for that one already, so it'll just be the tempo I'll need to hash out.  Feeling as good about the second song as I am, I spent the night tonight trying to figure out what the problem was in the verses of the song I've been working on for the last 8 days.  And if I'm not mistaken, I solved the problem.  A change in the order of chords here, another switcheroo there, and bang!  I like what I have now a whole lot better than what I had at the end of the day yesterday.  It means I'm going to have to change the bass line a bit as well, but I've already got thoughts on how that's going to go as well. Anne Lamott talks about "shitty first drafts" in her brilliant book on writing, Bird By Bird , and I think that what I ended up with this week was just that, a shitty first draft of a song.  So...