Skip to main content

Day One Hundred Sixty Three (Year Four)

I spent about 45 minutes or so in the studio tonight, once again, with the acoustic slung over my shoulder.

Tonight, I pulled out the Acoustic Goldmine book of lessons.  I had bought the whole series (Blues, Rock, Country, Jazz, & Acoustic) throughout the last year, and all of them are crammed full of great lessons.  I paged through the book for a bit, trying to decide where to dive in, and then decided that, if I was going to do it, and do it right, I was going to have to start from the beginning.  The first few lessons were pretty easy (I made it through 3 of them), but I also learned that all of the electric playing I've been doing has taken a little bit of the edge out of my fingers.  Barre chords on acoustic are always harder to play than they are on electric, and coming back to the acoustic after a bit of a layoff, it took me a bit to whip them back into some sort of shape.

We're heading out of town for a day or so tomorrow morning.  Haven't yet decided what sort of instrument I'm taking... but I'm definitely taking one along.  I'm feeling too good about the way things are going right now to be away from one for even 24 hours.  Maybe that makes me crazy.  Maybe I'm okay with that.

Good day today, but now I need to sleep.

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 Ninety Three (Year Six)

Today was an interesting day. On one hand, it wasn't a day where I spent a ton of time in the studio, but on the other hand, it was a day where the time that I did spend in the studio was probably the most productive time I've had in a long time.  In short, even though I didn't spend all that much time working on the EP tonight, I feel like I got a whole lot closer to finishing it. I've been frustrated with myself lately for not finishing things a bit quicker, and struggling with the fact that, while I have been successful at finding a whole lot of kernels of songs, they haven't seemed to want to sprout into completed works.  Tonight, instead of freaking out and making myself more stressed out, I sat down and looked at a few favorite songs to see if I could sneak a peek behind the veil, if you will. The answers jumped out at me immediately.  I haven't been doing enough with the kernels.  Mostly, I haven't been facilitating the chord changes that will a...