Skip to main content

Day Three Hundred Fourteen (Year Four)

Today was productive.  I spent part of my time in between calls at work today thinking over last night's time in the studio (and subsequent blog post), and jotting down a few notes about everything that I had laid out on the studio floor.  Inevitably, this ends up taking the form of a list breaking down how I want to organize things for effective learning & practice going forward.

This is one of those things that seems to happen at least once a year, usually around this time, but it never seems to end up completed to my liking (which is probably why it keeps coming up).  This year, I'm determined to get things set up the way they should've been a long time ago.  Part of "put up or shut up" is acknowledging the mistakes I've made in the past, and working hard, so that they don't keep happening.

Along those same lines, one of my other big hang-ups is starting a new notebook every time I try to reshuffle my thoughts on this.  The end result of which is, of course, that there are various chunks of thoughts and ideas concerning my practice binder/studying/learning spread out all over the place from the last four years.  This isn't helping anyone (least of all me).  So, in the spirit of fixing mistakes/errors in judgement, tonight I went on a hunt for at least a few of those notebooks.  I found the ones from the last couple of years, and I'm finally in the process of getting all of that information put into one place, so that, at any given time, I have easy access to all of my thoughts, plans, and hopes for my various musical adventures.

Ultimately, last night, tonight, and at least tomorrow night are all about building the foundation for everything.  Or, perhaps more aptly put, they are about putting together all of the edge pieces for the musical puzzle I'm assembling.  Over the years (and this year especially), I've put together various sections of the puzzle, and have even attached some of those bits to the border of it.  It's time to finish dealing with the edge pieces, so that I can work to create a complete picture.

Comments

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....

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...

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...