You know, I do these internet music challenges all the time and I keep making these plans in my head for how to make each one unique and I somehow forget that if you don’t practice all the time these little plans can result in physical pain.
I’m doing an album-in-a-month thing this month. National Solo Album Month. Write and record an album all by yourself within the month of November. No problem. I have three mini personal challenges going on to make it a little more interesting. First, no songs will be in 4/4 time. That’s crazy. Second, saxophone parts on every song. Maybe a little melody here and an improvised solo there. I don’t have to play sax all the way through every song, but my alto does need to make an appearance on every song. That is going to be brutal because my muscles are so out of practice (from not playing sax in years) that I will get maybe five minutes of playing before my jaw stops working correctly and I have to rest up for an hour or so to recover. The third mini-challenge is acoustic guitar on every song.
That’s the surprisingly tough one. I know I am out of shape guitar playing wise. I played a lot through the end of September but then I didn’t play at all in October and lost whatever gains I had made in the stamina and finger tip calluses departments. So I am going to struggle. What I forgot was, acoustic guitar is WAY harder to play than electric guitar. The strings are a lot heavier and its generally less forgiving and just takes more strength in your hands, particularly your fret hand.
I spent about an hour playing this morning before work. I worked on three of the new songs. One has acoustic guitar all the way through. Another has acoustic guitar on the break in the middle, and the third has acoustic guitar on the outro. By the time I was done with the third song my hands were KILLING me. For cryin’ out loud, Robert… would it kill you to just practice now and then? Is staying in shape really that tough? What a jerk!
Anyway, the good news is music is being made. The bad news is, ouch. We’ll see how things look come the end of the month.
Here’s my cheap little Yamaha acoustic guitar. I loaned it to the singer in my last band years ago and I only recently got it back. It has nice new strings that take a massive amount of effort for lazy old me to play. I think its an FG-401, if you’re into info like that. Ebay and Reverb tell me that I could sell it for about $150. I think that’s about what I paid for it back in the mid-90’s.
