Independence Day

"You'll end up in situations where you want to do some sort of skill-measuring contest, [but] it's always hard to tell if you've improved. It's easy to say 'Oh, my rank is higher than yesterday', but did you get better? ... You'd get up to like the A- or A range, and you'd play against some player who was just really good. Out of ten games we'd play in a row, I would win three or maybe four, and none of them felt good.... I found that same guy again, and he wanted to play another ten games, and suddenly I won every single one of those games, and his units felt predictable and stupid. His play felt so flawed, and at no point during the game did I ever actually feel nervous. After all those hours of playing, I was like 'Oh my god... I actually improved!' " -- Sean Day[9] Plott

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In early November, I created a series of exercises designed to improve the independence between my two hands. In each exercise, I would choose an arbitrary sequence of fingers on my left hand, an arbitrary sequence on the right hand, and cycle through both at the same time while moving up and down the fretboard of my roommate's bass. When I first started out, I would always choose exercises that used the same number of fingers on each hand. Twos and threes were pretty easy, but the fours totally threw my brain for a loop. I would look at my spreadsheet and think "I'm supposed to cycle through 1-3-2-4 on one hand and 4-1-2-3 on the other? How the hell am I going to be able to coordinate that?"

But somehow, the right gears gradually clicked into place, and I cruised through those exercises. I decided to bump up the complexity by incorporating patterns with different numbers of fingers on each hand. Some of them felt so clunky and awkward that it would take me nearly an hour just to get through a handful (no pun intended). I struggled and struggled and struggled, until the day when I realized that I wasn't actually struggling anymore. I could just choose a pattern for one hand, choose one for the other, and zip through it. It felt like I was just installing programs into my hands rather than thinking about what I was doing.

Yesterday, after 5 months and more than 100 hours of work, I finally finished all 3600 exercises. Unlike the various other musical projects I've worked on, I still have a distinct memory of what it felt like when I started. As I closed out of my organizational spreadsheet for the very last time, I thought about that old feeling and had a startlingly awesome realization: "Oh my god... I actually improved!"

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Week 39 total: 20.5
Grand total: 830.5 hours
Required pace: 750 hours (+80.5)