Practicing

Tonight on a guitar-related forum that I'm on, someone posted a question about how much time people spend practicing. I responded that these days I usually practice about two to two and half hours a week - and that there was a time, long ago, when I was doing that much each day.

This is the problem with guitar playing as a hobby: it takes time to achieve and maintain a skill level that makes it worthwhile, but almost anything else has to take priority over practice time.

This problem is compounded for (would-be) multi-instrumentalists, who need to keep up on several instruments - all of which are likely to suffer as a result.

Changing strings

I've never been one of those people who can change a set of strings in five minutes, so it's something that I don't do as often as I probably should. In fact, I hadn't done so since before Christmas. But I finally got around to doing so the other night. (John Pearse PB lights, on my Larrivee; what was on it previously was D'Addario PB lights.)

So why did it take so long to get around to this? Here's a clue: to find time to do this, I had to multitask - at the same time I was changing strings, I was transferring video from my camcorder to my computer to eventually burn it to a DVD. And I didn't start on any of this until I was done with various other tasks.

But that's kind of the nature of my musical endeavors in general. I've been working off and on on a recording project for months. I've been noodling around with a new instrumental piece for months, and have never really developed it into a finished form. The list could go on...but you get the idea.

And so that's probably why I remain a talentless hack....

It's also probably why this blog will go largely neglected: no time to devote to maintaining it.