more scrittles

Since May, when I found myself moved so much by a Nels Cline performance (for an umpteenth time) that I began to get serious about practicing again, I've been keeping a log of the playing I do each day. The time spent, the location (since then, I've stayed in two different apartments and probably about 50 hotels, between traveling around California for my consulting job, and our trip down here - maybe at some point it won't be so interesting anymore - but I like seeing entries like "1 hr, San Diego airport" or "2 hrs, balcony, El Paso, Texas") and a description of what I played.

I don't have a practice routine, I really just play what seems interesting at the moment. When I went to Berklee, I did have a routine, and it worked well, but part of that was to try to make sense of what I was learning in harmony each day, and to try to maximize that time of absolute dedication to guitar. It also seemed to make sense as the rest of my day was a strict routine as well. It was an interesting life; I stayed in the dormitories, which were the upper floors of the building that also housed the cafeteria where I worked every day of the week, as well as most of the classrooms, plus the rehearsal rooms where bands played together, and the practice rooms. I could literally go for a week without seeing direct sunshine. My day was like this; rise at 10:30 for classes from 11 to 4, then work from 4:30 to 9:45 in the cafeteria, then shower and go to a practice room from 10 until 5 am. This didn't vary much in the weekends, except that I'd usually work a breakfast and lunch shift which ended at 2 - I usually went to the library to watch a Coltrane video or listen to something from the huge reel-to-reel collection before showing up for the dinner shift.

Each night I'd bring my tiny Roland cube amp, Ibanez Artist (labeled the "fusion" guitar at Berklee), bottle of spring water and banana stolen from the cafeteria to the practice rooms in the basement. There were rooms on each dorm floor as well, but I liked the rooms in the subsection as hardly anyone else was ever there, except a dedicated jazz cat named Gene who played the thickest strings I've ever seen and introduced me to the impossibly heavy Dunlop Stubby 3.0mm picks I still use. (Another reason was that the rooms were accessible only via a hallway of girls' dorm rooms from the New England Conservatory. I ended up making quite a few friends on the hallway of ballerinas and musical theatre ingenues, and dated one of the dancers who lived there for a few months.)

I started with an hour and a half of warmups, focusing on tiny things about my technique like the exact angle my pick hit the strings or the minimum amount of pressure needed from my left hand. I'd set the metronome at 60 bpm and stroke once a second, trying to find the perfect stroke and reproduce it time after time. Then I did an hour and a half of scales and modes - before I came, I knew only the major scale in two positions and the minor pentatonic, so I had a lot of learning to do. After that I focused on chords for an hour or so, learning inversions and comping through standards from the Real Book. I usually had material for juries to work on after that (a jury is a sort of performance test, which here involved quizzes on modes, sight-reading, and a few pieces), or a piece for my chord soloing class, one of my favorite classes there but unfortunately the one that suffered the most from my schedule, being the first one of the day...several times I stayed up til 6 or even 7 in the morning perfecting a piece, which I never got to play because I slept through the alarm well past noon. I'd finish by doing scales and picking exercises again for an hour.