Progress report:
Lo
ng overdue progress report I should say! I swear I have been practicing, though perhaps not as often as I would like. I keep letting things get in the way, and that’s really not good because I really want to practice.
But, I had no excuse at all today, as the port we’re in has little to offer unless you want to pay a rather large chunk of change for a two hour transfer into town and since I’m not working until much later in the afternoon…so after lunch while Amras was at rehearsal I pulled Strange out of her case, tuned her up and went back to work.
My fingers may still sting a little bit but they are definitely improving, and the song that seemed totally impossible only a few weeks ago is going swiftly from “I can stumble through it” to “Hey, I can almost strum this properly, and wait, did I just do that whole run without looking at my fretboard? I totally did just do that whole run without looking at my fretboard!”.
Amras has been starting to teach me basic strumming patterns – before this I was just moving from chord to chord without any sense of real rhythm, just concentrating on getting my fingers in the right place. For the most part I’m still just concentrating on getting my fingers in the right place, but it would be nice to be able to really play just one song when I get home – so I’m trying to learn to at least strum that one thing. It’s much harder than I had first thought, as my ears can tell what my hands want to do but it can’t quite make them do it yet.
But I can tell that I’m getting there, little bit by little bit, string by string and chord by chord, I’m getting there.
And I absolutely love it.