M2M Day 137: I’ve been slacking off
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For March, my goal is to play a 5-minute blues guitar solo.
Today, I practiced the guitar for about 90 minutes, one of my longest training sessions so far this month. And yet, it didn’t feel super productive.
Namely, my playing is stuck in a bit of a rut. I don’t necessarily mean that it’s bad (in fact, I’ve already improved much more this month than I anticipated), but rather, my playing feels very repetitive — everything I play is inspired by the same, narrow set of musical ideas.
Basically, I’ve been slacking off.
Let me explain…
My original plan was to first build up an arsenal of musical inspiration (by learning from an number of different blues artists and songs), and then, convert this inspiration into reasonably solid blues guitar playing.
Instead, I only analyzed two songs, before I shifted all of my focus to my own improvisations. As a result, I have two songs’ worth of ideas to pull from… Hence, my musical rut.
For the past week, every day, I’ve considered analyzing a new song, but chose to noodle around and practice general technique instead.
This is embarrassingly bad… I’m clearly shying away from the “harder”, more intensive thing, even though I know it’s important to my progress. And this is exactly the definition of slacking off: “Not doing something, even though you know you should”.
Tomorrow, I will stop with the slacking, and shift my focus back to building my arsenal of musical inspiration.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
