I had scheduled a recording project with Tony Geballe this weekend to begin work on my next solo guitar release. Being an organized sort of fellow I set this up months ago. I did not take into account a sneak attack by the flu. For one that prides himself on his planning skills ... Needless to say guitar work the past four days has been minimal so hopefully the preparation of the past few weeks will suffice.
During the past weeks I have applied a variety of techniques to learning the pieces I wish to record. All are solo compositions of my own that came to me sometime in the past year. The past few months the muse has favored me with several new pieces that kept me busy. Thus three of the four pieces needed to be relearned and one of them went through a fairly major revision. Perhaps this is why I am the least confident of that particular piece " Leaving Song."
Beside dissecting the pieces and practicing transitions and phrasing; I recorded rough takes of all them over time. Much time has been spent listening to these takes primarily on my commute to work to get these pieces in my ear. I can now hear them with out playing them. Even sing them a bit. Plus they have all been notated. This is all new ground for me as I continue to learn what works for me to achieve growth in my musical abilities.
I have also worked with visualizing the pieces. Visualization of the fretboard has never come easy to me. Progress has been made in this area recently probably due to having the pieces in my auditory memory. Last night and tonight while doing my Alexander Technique lie downs I was visualizing while resting my left elbow on the floor and allowing my left hand to move and form the needed chord shapes. I can not verify if this is adding anything to my performance of the pieces but will experiment more.
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