Weekly update 25 November 2018

One of the things about getting old, at least for me, is that occasionally I wake up rather early and fail to get back to sleep. It's fun to get 2 hours of practice in before sunrise though!

I'm still grinding through the AT Electric Gypsy lick, est. 7,700 reps and counting. This week I'll be graduating to 65% of full tempo. That's significant to me because when I first figured out the outline of the lick 65% tempo was where things totally fell apart for me. By that I mean I couldn't "hear" what I needed to be playing at that speed, or even come close to getting my fingers to respond. It was where things fell off a cliff. In this exercise I split my weekend time between "last week's speed" and "next week's speed". While I can't say that after all the reps 65% is easy, but it is now very manageable as a practice tempo and is no longer my ceiling.

On Pride and Joy I'm progressing even better arguably. This week I'll be working at 80-85% tempo for the turnaround like. Once I got over 70% I started to be able to feel the beat/rhythm which opened up a whole slew of things I needed to refine but it is coming along pretty well. I've also started working on the entire first chorus. That whole walking bass/muted upbeat "stab" thing he did has vexed me for more than two decades, and I'm excited to report that even that wall feels like it is coming down and I'm starting to believe a reasonable facsimile is within reach.

Bruce and Phil have made good points about the importance of working with reduced tempos and large numbers of repetitions. No doubt both of those have been important aspects of this exercise for me. But I think the real secret sauce to all of this has been playing along with the recorded part at the reduced tempos throughout all the repetitions. It's been a good listening exercise trying to listen simultaneously to myself and the "correct" version, and a better playing exercise trying to continually adjust what I'm doing to match the goal in pitch, rhythm/timing, and articulation. Even though I'm continually reminded of my shortcomings this way, there's been an unexpected surge in confidence across all of my playing. Apparently my subconscious is registering the convergence of what I'm aiming for and what I can do even though my conscious mind is mostly focused on the gap between the two (admittedly, every so often my conscious mind even says, "Holy $hit dude, that sounded right!)" . It's helpful I'm sure that I live alone. My dog doesn't give a hoot one way or the other if I loop the same thing over-and-over-and-over and struggle through clam-after-clam-after-clam. That brings up another thing worth mentioning. My enthusiasm shouldn't be taken as a claim I'm getting good at these couple of bits, it's really based on feeling that I'm extracting myself from a very long-term rut.

I've gotten so focused on those two projects that I'm not putting much time into all the other things I'm supposed to be working on. For now I'm good with that.