In more recent years there’s been a real question of where exactly guitar playing might fit in with my career, enough so that I go months without picking the thing up..

There’s this local little place.. “the chicken bone” where they do karaoke with a live band, and musicians can get up and play… I spent a couple day’s of the previous week trying to de-rust myself., and just to make matters worse I have a bad eczema outbreak on my hands. I got up on stage, pretty drunk by that point, and was like “ok, we’re just going to make this one up as we go along.” …and of course I had a friend video tape it.

I thought it went unspeakably horribly.. which is in part just my inability to easily like anything I do.. and i continued to hate it till I had transcoded the video.. and was watching it full screen.. and then.. well, I started to see qualities in it. Not so bad for being that drunk.. playing with musicians I had never played with.. who knows how comfortable they are with improvising.. and being horribly rusty.

So now I’ve reset my goal of at least picking up my guitar everyday.. and to get on stage at least once for that once a week thing… and I’m at least toying with the idea of possibly putting together an album or something of fairly guitar centric music. Seems like it would just be a shame not to do something like that with all the time I’ve put into it in the past.

Goals have always been a little difficult for my creative process.. The basic thing is just make sure I’m working on it.. and then it’s like.. some kind of self criticism and thinking about where I want to go.. who I want to be.. Long term goals are kinda weird cause its like.. do you want to flush out where you’re already strong or jump into some area where you know you will be horrible for a long time.. make that jump into the darkness.

Mostly I create electronic music where I don’t actually have to perform anything.. I just compose, program, design, mix.. and for that I’m always stretching out into new areas.. how can I produce live? Lets learn to program in MAX, lets learn high end visual effects for the video show and work out hot to integrate that into the music in live performance.

So my practice goal for right now is simply to de-rust… and see if I can’t bring some life back into my playing.. in the sense that compositional ideas are just kind of in bloom on my guitar. I’m looking at Melodyne DNA as a possible method of exploring bizzar harmonic structures that I might not be able to realize other wise. I want to get my playing rock solid.. I’m debating learning some new material.. I’m thinking I’d like to develop something that works around my electronic music which means really developing a kind of improvisation pallet around harmonic minor modalism, and synthetic scales.. and I’m thinking about exploring the blues a little bit… Maybe see if I can’t do something interesting about bringing the blues into harmonic minor modal and synthetic kinda areas.

But I don’t know.. I just know that I must get my playing so that it does not suck!

Long term goal: I have an audition for the University of Victoria’s music program (studying with Alexander Dunn) in January. I’m working on preparing pieces for that now.

Mid term: improve my free stroke and rest stroke speed for the faster passages in Capricho Arabe (Narciso style), and work on dynamics within the context of more simple pieces (ex. Sor etude, Barrios prelude, Bach prelude etc.)

Daily: basically the same as my mid term, though what’s on my practice mind right now is bringing out the melody in Baroque pieces like the Scarlatti piece I’m working on right now. My thumb tends to be too heavy, and I have a tough time separating its heaviness from my other fingers.

Mid-term goals include: weekly performance for the guitar class at Austin Peay, and doing some volunteer performing for hospitals, etc. I also have a less formal recital in December at a local church.

-CD