Afternoon Is For Chumps

Published: Fri, 08/26/22

As the gleaming, efficient machinery that is the Fretboard Confidential infrastructure slowly creaks back into action, a phenomenon unsurprisingly coinciding with the return of the Fretboard progeny to the halls of academia, I've been experimenting with a new routine. It's been an article of faith of mine for the past few decades that the only way to get any practicing done is first thing in the morning or, adjusting for practicality, as the first actual work I do once I land in my studio. Afternoon is for chumps, or so my thinking has always gone; not only is morning the only reliable time to make things happens before the day intrudes, it's also when I'm most able to ignore the various thoughts tugging at my attention long enough to focus on something as vague and abstract at getting incrementally better at picking certain strings with certain fingers at a certain time while using the fingers of my other hand to press those same strings to a length of mathematically divided wood at more or less the same time.

The snag is, there's only one morning to every day, or so my limited three-dimensional, linear thinking goes, so whatever happens in the afternoon is bound to get relatively short shrift compared to what happens in the morning. But my fall experiment involves a very specific production schedule for all the stuff that has to happen – the lessons for the Fingerstyle Five membership, videos for the Youtube channel, and – meta alert – this weekly newsletter. (Side note: after five-plus years, you'd think I'd have come up with a snappier name for the newsletter than "the newsletter.") And I've decided the best way to make sure all that gets done is to do it in the morning. Which means I have to figure out how to make the afternoon feel like the morning, if you see what I mean.

As anyone with anything to do ever already knows, it's usually not the doing of the thing that's so tricky. It's the sitting down and starting to do the thing. With a specific project, like making a record or producing a 10-page PDF of notation and tablature, that's something you can A) set a deadline for, B) carve up into finite steps and C) show up to work on at a relatively specific time of day. But practicing is, well, more of a practice than a project. It's the showing up itself that matters most, and yet if you don't work backwards from some larger purpose, you won't know what to do with yourself once you have shown up. This is why in some ways it's easiest to be a beginner at something, because it's pretty obvious what the first things you need to learn are (see: my efforts to play a basic 4/4 groove on the drums).

So while having a really obvious sense of what I need to do the in mornings this fall is fabulous, all I've got so far for the afternoons is: "Well, I'm going to show up and practice." But I've yet to choose some specific purposes to work my way backwards from, so I'm not quite sure yet what to do with myself once I've showed up. That kind of clarity is what removes friction, what allows you to say "Well, it's afternoon – time to sit down for forty-five minutes and work on ––––." If I can figure out what that is, I'll have a shot a making the afternoon feel like the morning. Which should earn me some kind of Nobel prize for metaphysics, or a least a mention on somebody's blog about Dr. Who.
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Speaking of time, I'm pretty sure social media is a total waste of mine, and yet thanks to the various musicians in my feed, I'm routinely made aware of all kinds of things I would have otherwise remained completely unaware of. Case in point: as I write this, I'm listening for the first time to the late Monette Sudler, who passed away this week in her native Philadelphia. Turns out social media is almost as good as reading books when it comes to learning what's out there. The obituary my friend Matt Munisteri reposted was written by Nate Chinen, author of Playing Changes, a consideration of jazz in the 21st century and the subject of yet another great interview by Leo Sidran for the Third Story podcast. I've included links below to both the Chinen article and the interview, along with a link to a playlist on my web site of various Monette Sudler tracks.

Monette Sudler – Nate Chinen obituary

Nate Chinen on The Third Story podcast

Monette Sudler playlist

More soon,

David
 
david@davidhamburger.com

P.O. Box 302151
Austin TX 78703
USA


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