Here are a couple of little things that I learned about myself today.
From about 6:30am through about 1:30pm I pretended I was a musician. I took the four remaining unfinished songs from my 2007 RPM failure and worked them over good. Three of the songs had rhythm guitar/bass/drums finished. The one remaining only had drums and bass finished.
So what did I get done today? Wrote and recorded lyrics and melodies for all four, finished the one missing rhythm guitar part, and recorded the lead guitar on three of the four songs.
So you’re still wondering what it was I learned about myself today, right? Well here goes.
I learned that for me, practice is wicked important. I am way out of practice both as a guitar player and a singer. It shows most clearly in my pathetic sense of rhythm. My timing has been just the tiniest bit off all day long. At a casual listen it sounds almost all right, but when I am paying attention everything just feels sloppy. It’s… off.
I’ve always had a problem keeping myself in phase, as it were, but lack of practice seriously exacerbates the issue. (Yes, I just used exacerbates in a sentence that wasn’t referring to Shaun of the Dead. 100 points for me!)
I also re-learned just how important calluses are when playing guitar. I needed about 10000000 takes to get the leads right on one of these terrible songs today and I now have the searing agony in my finger tips to prove it. The blisters are forming.
The good news is, I am close to having four (4) more songs finished. Bad timing and crappy soloing aside, that’s not bad for a random Tuesday, eh?