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TACer for Life – TACing is Life!
1.) How many days per week do you play?
I play 7 days a week most weeks. Much of my play time is dedicated to acquiring new skills or honing skills I’ve been learning.
2.) What time of day do you play?
I typically play in several sessions throughout the day. Most every evening, I play for 2-3 hours in the late evening. I often play when “normal” people (like my wife) are sleeping. Because I retired from gainful employment, I also play most mornings, often for several hours. From about mid-December to mid-March, I’m typically teaching skiing five days a week and that generally precludes my morning sessions. This past season, we had a later start time for our ski school where I teach mid-week (3 days), so I often got to play on mornings before driving to the hill. I play/practice a lot!
3.) Where do you play?
I play in the family room in a recliner/rocker. I know – any guitar teacher would shudder about my lousy posture, but I’m playing for my own enjoyment, not to fulfill someone else’s dreams. I have a whole bunch of guitar books within easy reach and a couple music stands. Besides holding music, the stands are great for holding my phone that I use to connect to the Virtual Open Mics via Zoom (pretty frequently) or record things (rarely these days – oddly, I play better at open mics than I do when I try to record myself).
4.) What was your guitar life like before having a guitar routine & how has implementing a consistent guitar routine helped you? (if possible name 3 ways).
When I started guitar almost 8-1/2 years ago, I began studying with Tom, a local jazz master who I have been friends with since long before that. I got to know him by seeing him play often. He’s a good teacher, too, but the college where I was meeting with him got a new music department Chair who squashed the idea of teaching any students from off campus. We never got a mutually agreeable time and place to continue lessons, so I toughed it out on my own for about a year and a half. I continued practicing on my own, pretty much daily, but not for nearly as long as I do now. I was only really practicing the things that Tom had written out for me and maybe occasionally looking for a YouTube “How to Play …” lesson for additional inspiration
All that changed one day in late June 2017. I watched one of Tony’s webinars and bit the bullet. The funny thing is that I clicked on the “lifetime” button next to the buttons for monthly or annual subscriptions, but I could not get it to work. Part of the marketing schtick was to have a countdown timer that said we had to act then or the offer would expire. I remember getting so frustrated – here I am, trying to make a purchase and once more being confounded by technology. So reluctantly I clicked on the annual subscription and registered my “complaint’ via the customer support path, explaining that I expected my annual fee would be credited in full toward a lifetime membership at the price I saw. Noah got back in touch with me and asked for my patience, saying the lifetime feature was not yet operational. I think it took a few months before he contacted me one day and said the lifetime purchase was ready for testing. I was the first one to test it!
Another thing happened that day that the lifetime membership purchase was officially completed; I bought into Fretboard Wizard. Although I knew a fair amount of music theory from many years of playing trumpet in community bands, FW was life changing regarding my guitar learning. It was the stepping stone to a deeper understanding of harmony and it launched me into the world of transcribing songs to play on guitar. Now I never run out of material!
Here are some ways a consistent routine has helped me:
– I am most comfortable with flatpicking, and I certainly have made tremendous gains at that. But the fact that we alternate weeks between flatpicking and fingerpicking has lured me into this whole new world of expression that fingerpicking offers. Yes, I still find it tremendously more difficult than flatpicking, but I’m so happy that I now have access to learning so much more.
– The theory knowledge (some of it gained from dailies, but FW unlocked a whole lot more) has inspired me to grow in new directions. I already mentioned transcription. That is giving me a new level of appreciation for artists I’ve known for decades and all those wonderful albums I’ve amassed over a lifetime of collecting and appreciating music.
– I get lost (in a very good way) in working my though difficult sections, trying to build muscle memory and play hard runs cleanly. I am able to play many things with my eyes closed, because I practice them that way. My hope is that I will be able to make a solid connection with audiences if I don’t need to look down at my hands.
– I learned how to sing while I play. This is obviously impossible to do on trumpet, but it also seemed impossible to do on guitar. Heck, it seemed impossible to play anything well on guitar even when I wasn’t singing, but about two years after starting TAC, I started to play some open mics in local bars. Certainly the TAC community, the jam club open mics and the encouragement I got from attending ALF were a big part of this, but if I didn’t have a solid guitar routine, those things would never have happened.
– I have become pretty good at memorizing music – both the guitar part and the lyrics!
– I feel much more at home playing at jams. Although COVID has shut things down for over a year, I was playing a monthly folk jam and a monthly guitar pull, the latter attended by many really good local singer/songwriters. I’m not afraid to join in on some of the picking sessions at festivals. TAC has therefore expanded my community of friends – not only within TAC but also among local guitar players.
– It gave me enough confidence to play along with a bluegrass band I hired to play for a private party my wife and I held. I got up in front of friends, many of whom didn’t even know I played guitar, and I played a few songs.
5.) Bonus Question:
What is one non-guitar item that is a must have in your guitar routine?
My iPad of my phone – it’s how I connect to the lesson site, plus it’s also my gateway to the zoom open mics. Also, I usually take a little time to interact with the TAC community via the forums because playing often makes me think of something to share, like a small win.
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