Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of jamming with M-Bot, a friend and fellow open mic night regular. We journeyed down to my basement, cranked both of our amps to 11, and rocked out like total bosses. So bossy was the rockage that we collaboratively won the ears and heart of a passing lady critter who, with eyes all a-twinkle, graciously accepted a copy of Ready or Not before scurrying off to fold her laundry. By the end of our three hour jam session, M-Bot and I had thoroughly ravaged our fingertips. Along the way, I made two interesting observations:
First, I fully realized how helpful jamming can be for generating fresh new melodies and chord structures. This is obviously the case when other musicians are suggesting the chords, as would often happen when I played with my older brother and his comrades over the summer. Back then, our keyboardist would throw out crazy combinations of chords, and occasionally I would think "Well this is de-goddamn-licious; I'll have to remember it for later," semicolon and all. But this time, with M-Bot, I was always the one laying down the chords, and yet somehow I found myself playing things that felt wonderfully foreign, even to my own hands.
The other was an extremely encouraging realization that there are elements of my technique that are so natural to me now that, even though I don't perceive them as being particularly difficult or interesting, can completely take others by surprise. At one point I threw in a few right-hand harmonics, a somewhat unorthodox technique that I first tried only a few months after I started playing guitar. M-Bot, who is a fairly competent guitarist in his own right, was bewildered. Even after I explained the technique in detail, he still couldn't quite get the hang of it. It seems reasonable to suggest that an expert musician would want this to be true for all of his techniques: to be so comfortable with them that he can't even remember the struggling.
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Week 32 total: 19 hours
Grand total: 731 hours
Required pace: 615.5 hours (+115.5)
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