This is now the 13th week of the year.  Three months have passed and it’s time for me to do a little review. I committed to doing these quarterly reviews back in December.  So here we are.  Although I’m going to be reviewing all of the goals I set at the beginning of the year (financial, health, etc.) I’m just going to focus on one goal here: daily music practice.

Over the past 90 days I logged 49 hours of practice. Not bad. That’s about 4 hours a week. Considering that I’m spending most of my free time composing new music, I’m happy with this these 49 hours.

What was I practicing?

I spent most of my time with the guitar, though I did also work on some lap steel stuff and some drum stuff.  But guitar is my first instrument. I think in guitar. So that’s where I’ve been spending most of my time.

I decided to go back to some fundamentals for a while, starting with the major scale.

I worked through the first 42 pages of the Berklee “Modern Method For Guitar – Book 2,” which covered the following:

• C Major
• F Major
• G Major
• D Major
• A Major
• Bb Major

(Ascending and descending in 5 positions)

I also worked on some Diatonic Interval stuff.

• 3rds
• 4ths
• 5ths
• 6ths
• 7ths

I worked though each interval in 5 positions on the guitar, playing each interval up, reversed, alternating directions, and then improvising.

Yep. Almost 50 hours spent just working on the basics.  More importantly, it was some good quality time.  Kind of like morning meditation.

“Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem as eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it.”

~Michael Ende

Another metric of interest: 38 gigs.

I played 38 gigs in the past 3 months. That’s kinda slow, actually.  But the first couple months of the year are usually the slowest.