Uh oh - a spanner in the works!

The cold I’ve been desperately fending off has finally hit me like a ton of bricks today. I’ve had to cancel tonight’s open mic, and I'm gutted. I'm still optimistic I'll hit my target for this week if I can shake it off quickly - I’ve already done two so only need to fit one more in. I'm now signed up for another one on Sunday evening. If I'm still too sick to play by then (or if the PCR test I took today comes back positive!), I’ll be super-disappointed - but hey, if that happens, maybe I can squeeze four into a future week to make it up! (Gosh!). 

In the meantime I’m gonna work on adding a few more performance-ready songs to my repertoire. My original plan was to get seven of my songs 'open-mic ready'. That meant figuring out the best live arrangements to make the songs work with just one guitar and voice, and then practicing until I can play them flawlessly. So far I've only really got three to a standard I'm confident to play live. The others aren't a million miles away, but I'm still making too many mistakes to risk them. The blocker is inevitably my guitar-playing. Sadly I'm not yet as highly skilled a guitarist as I'd like to be! But my musical brain tends to write cheques that my fingers can't cash... so I write things that are beyond my capability to play 'off the bat' and which need a lot of time investment to learn. I don't necessarily mind that - it's kind of the process by which I learn and get better! But it's definitely a source of frustration - and to be honest has been a blocker to my confidence in playing live. When my brain can envisage music that's much more engaging than my muscle memory can deliver, I often feel disappointed by the end result - and my musical brain always seems to be one step ahead of my fingers.

In this case, because I want the songs to be interesting and not repetitive, I'm looking to vary the guitar part across different sections of each song. I might achieve that via dynamics, by different styles of picking or strumming, or changing up how the chords are voiced over the course of the songs - or some combination of the above. To add to that, to make the *set* interesting, I'm also trying not to use the same 'formula' across different songs. But because my default 'bank' of guitar techniques is only so big, if I constrained myself to writing what I could already play off the bat, things could quickly get monotonous. Or, if not monotonous, not quite what I'd envisaged the songs to be - which I'd find a bit disappointing. So the upshot is that several of the guitar elements I’ve written still aren’t super-easy for me to play consistently without mistakes, despite having already put in a fair amount of practice. I should clarify - I haven't written anything vastly sophisticated or objectively 'hard' and many, many guitarists could easily play them without batting an eyelid. But they are beyond my personal capability to play without significant practice time, and I still need to put in a bit more hard graft and repetition to get all of the songs performance ready.

Referring back to my opening post, that what I meant when I said I’d made less progress than I’d hoped, despite a whole load of practice. I'd hoped to have all of these songs - plus 2-3 covers - done and dusted by the start of the challenge. The idea was that before each open mic my practice sessions would be about my performance skills rather than on learning to play the songs. So I was pretty disappointed to not reach where I'd hoped to by the start of Jan. But I also know that I did put a huge amount of work in - to the point where I felt kind of bad how little time I was spending with my family over the Christmas break! It also took me a while to figure out live arrangements that would work in the first place, before I could even begin to cement learning them - which I definitely didn't factor in enough time for in my planning. So I was undoubtedly being over-optimistic in my initial plan.

Given that, it's tempting now to stick to the three songs I've started to get comfortable playing. Technically I'd still have done my 'open mic challenge' if I did that. Or I could add other songs, but fall back to simplified versions, 'boring' arrangements I can easily play. After all, I’m back at work now, and it will be tricky to carve out all the practice time I'd need to finish what I'd started - especially given I'll be spending three evenings a week out at open mics! BUT I think it'd be a shame to do either of those options. So I’m determined to find the time. It's not an option to stick to the same repertoire - not least because I'll get bored myself, and also because I don't doubt I'll end up playing to many of the same familiar faces given the number I'm doing. And after putting in the creative effort to figure out more interesting arrangements, it'd be a massive shame to default to just strumming away! So in some ways getting ill has fallen in my favour, because by delaying tonight’s open mic to Sunday it gives me a few more days grace - and with that has given me a new resolve to get another set of songs ready by then!

A big challenge for me - which I'm sure I'm not alone in! - is that I can find the practice process REALLY BORING and REALLY FRUSTRATING - if I'm really doing it properly (ie repeating the tricky parts for hours on end). So I'm fighting an avoidance & procrastination battle with myself! It's understandable that a good practice session might not be a barrel of laughs... because it essentially boils down to continually repeating over and over again something you're bad at! It often means playing the same thing fifty times over, reeeallly slowly, while avoiding the temptation to speed up to the point where you start making mistakes. Inevitably, I am tempted... Tempted to speed up, tempted to add in the vocals when I haven't yet nailed the guitar, tempted to play the whole song instead while fudging the tricky parts I'm meant to be practicing. Tempted, basically, to enjoy playing what I *can* play, instead of putting the lions share of practice time into deliberately improving the parts I *can't* play well (yet). Playing what I am good at feels fulfilling (and confidence-enhancing), while repeating the complicated parts at a snail's pace feels painful and self-doubt-inducing... but 'deliberate practice' of the things outside my comfort zone is what will really make the difference in the long run. 

Anyway, while I have this cold, even if my brain isn't functioning particularly well, my fingers seem to be working ok. I won't push myself (after all I want to recover quickly!), but I'm now off to spend an evening meandering through some gentle, slow, boring repetitions of a few tricky guitar parts. I don't feel great given the swirling brain fog but I'm not sleepy yet and - hey, a less active brain might be less susceptible to boredom or frustration, right?! And of course, there's zero temptation to add vocals when my throat is on fire! Ok, ok, maybe I'm clutching at straws looking for silver linings to being sick - but fingers' crossed that by Sunday I'll be raring to go again, perhaps with another song or two in my back pocket :).