Skip to main content

Day Two Hundred Twenty Three (Year Four)

After taking a look back at my goals for the year yesterday, I wanted to not only enjoy getting back in the studio again, but also look to make some gains in what was really my first day where I felt like I had a substantial amount of time since the end of last month.  I feel like I was able to accomplish that today.  I,

1) Dove back into the Acoustic Goldmine book a little bit.  I stepped back a lesson or two in the stuff I had been working through, to the lesson on block chords, just because I wanted an excuse to stretch out my fingers a little bit, and get them reacquainted with some of the key concepts in this run of lessons on finger-picking.

2) Listened back to a couple of the demos for the songs I wrote last month, and was pleasantly surprised to still be happy with what I got done.  It's always a true test for me to step away for a little bit, and then go back to something and see if my opinions change.  Definitely looking forward to working on getting those songs cleaned up and sounding the way I want them to.

3) Lastly tonight, I wanted to at least touch on one of the things in my list that I hadn't even looked at yet.  The building of a set list made the most sense in that regard, so I grabbed a notebook and my iPod, and started jotting down songs that seemed like they would be fun to learn, but that would also make some sense in an acoustic setting.  I found almost a page full of songs in a short period of time, so that's cool, and it also means that I can say I've started in on another one of my goals for the year.

Tomorrow, I really want to do a little bit of electric stuff.  Find my way back into learning those 100 Riffs, that sort of thing.
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