First Post

Today is the fifth day of a commitment I made while reading The Affluent Artist Blog. The topic of Rock's blog that day was Procrastination, which made me think of what part of my creative process do I regularly procrastinate. He had also issued six week challenge for himself regarding his goals.

I decided to jump in and challenge myself to work with notating and the making of recordings to save ideas and pieces for future reflection. Over the years I have lost many pieces from not having a regular ongoing system for saving them. Two years ago I purchased an Edirol R-09, aportable mp3 recorder with built in mics so that I could always easily record a snapshot of an idea. And I have sporadically notated pieces.

Today is Day 5 of this commitment and it has been fruitful. I have posted updates to the Affluent Artist Blog and today decided it is time to begin my own blog. One piece Dancin' Free was notated the first two days of this process and the third day I brought overall order to my record keeping of the R-09 recordings.

Then yesterday on Day 4 a real breakthrough occurred.

From my post on the Afflunet Artist Blog.

" There was a piece that came out in December that I began notating the first few bars then and thought that I had recorded. I found out a while back that I had not recorded it and was distressed.
Tonight I spent a few minutes notating what I still knew and organized some notes on another piece. However I still had nearly ten minutes remaining to this commitment. I returned to working on the first piece ” Beneath Dark Images” to see if I could jog my brain.
This is always a tough place for me to be in, attempting to recapture a piece. Kicks up feelings of inadequacy & incompetence spinning me into a funk. But I persisted listening with my mind for the transition to the next section. What was I going to do. To move to another piece at this point would be a cop out.
Then I heard the next part in my ear. Played it. Yes. The piece began to reveal itself to me again. More playing and then I hit record and then made some notes."
Today I had such a sense of relief from this work of yesterday. I took another look at "Beneath Dark Images" and then moved on to exploring. I just began to play a chord and then another and I follow where they might lead me. I heard something that I liked, but did not have much time before I needed to leave so I recorded the idea.
Later in the evening I returned to this and as a new twist to my process I began notating this small snippet of an idea, just 16 bars. But while notating this I played a bit more with the notion and bounced to recording, and back to notating, and then a new rough recording.

Stay tuned for where this goes.