Vote Early And Often

Published: Thu, 01/27/22

Despite any number of nights in my twenties when I rolled home from one gig or another between two and four AM, I've always been a morning person trapped in the body of a musician. From last August until the end of the year, I wasn't getting to my studio until almost 10am, at which point my circadian rhythms were telling me the day was pretty much half gone. I was also making a point of getting in at least a half an hour of practicing before anything else, and if I got wrapped up in things a half an hour would become forty-five minutes or an hour, so often I wasn't even starting on any "real" work until after 11am. So when, with the new year, we re-scrambled Casa Fretboard's daily schedule and I found myself able to start working closer to 8:30am, I thought I'd try and maximize the mornings by pushing practicing to the afternoon.

Well. I'm here to report that that kind of sucked. I didn't realize it sucked right away, but you know what happened. By the afternoon other things had made their way onto the agenda, and practicing got edged out by the usual – returning emails, fixing something supposedly finished the day before, solving something only fixable during business hours. But then, yesterday morning, finding myself at the studio closer to 8am than 8:30 I thought "what the heck – I'll do a little composing practice for twenty minutes, just till 8:30." And boyo – what a difference that made. I forget – even after fading in and out of a morning practice routine for over three decades – just how much better life seems when I put in that small, regular bit of focused attention on getting incrementally better at one particular thing. From any strictly pragmatic point of view, learning to write for string quartet is not necessary, any more than rereading Raymond Chandler or making the perfect tuna melt is. But it's something I neglect at my own peril because, like watching Marlowe pirouette through The High Window or getting the chemistry of heat, butter, rye bread and Swiss cheese just right, it makes my life both intangibly and immeasurably better to do so.

Every few months, I do a series of free live streams to teach three foundational skills for playing better fingerstyle blues: how to groove, how to improvise and how to arrange a song. Over the next few days, I'll show you how to take the eight-bar blues "Trouble In Mind" from groove to complete arrangement using the step-by-step, hands-on methods I teach every month in my Fingerstyle Five membership. If half of getting better is just showing up to practice, the other half is knowing what to practice, so if you'd like a clear, step-by-step plan for improving your playing, join me live starting this morning at 11:30 AM Central.

A replay will be made available immediately afterwards as well. For a PDF with notation and tab for all the lesson material, you can download the tab, without the hassle of re-entering an email address, at the link below:

Get The Tab For All Three Lessons

Join me live on Youtube at 11:30 AM Central this morning using the following link:

Play Better Fingerstyle Blues, Part I: Groove

More soon,

David