After I released Chasing Saturday I got back to some of the musical debt that I have accumulated. I owed things to the cloxco crew and a couple of other folks, so I made a recording or two and sent them out. Being as this is the season for not being able to get things done, I don’t expect to hear anything back for a while. That’s cool by me as I’m neck deep in Christmas excitement with my son and my wife and I are almost done building our daughter. Things are crazy. But I still have my time. My studio time. The sacred time.
I restrung my classical guitar about the time that my musical house was almost in order and in a fit of excitement, I dug out the Segovia scales and Mauro Giuliani’s 120 daily exercises for the right hand. It was humbling. I am badly out of practice. I don’t feel good about that. It’s time to get back to old habits, so I have.
An hour with these two books a night is hardly enough to recover from how out of shape I have become, but it’s what I have so it is what I will give over to the craft. I feel so good after the woodshedding. There is something so deeply satisfying about practicing. There are few other things like it. I would say that physical exercise is one. Being able to do 100 pushups is impressive, but it’s not really meaningful for anyone other than the person who does them. Scales and arpeggios are the same way. Memorizing all of the Segovia scales and the right hand exercises is a personal discipline. It pays very real dividends in performance and when writing, but it’s deeper than that.
Practicing is doing something for yourself. It is actively making you a better performer, a better listener, and a more disciplined artist. It’s proof of your dedication to your craft.
I’ve missed practicing and I didn’t really realize it. Of course I will have to get back to producing music and my hour isn’t going to get any longer any time soon, so some of this will fall to the wayside. But if I can integrate it into my day somehow, I know that I will feel much, much better.
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