Practice Practice Practice
During the past month I’ve been putting in about 2 hours per day of practice. A lot of it has been guitar practice in preparation for tomorrow night’s 80s Invasion gig in Seattle, but I’ve also been working on my bass parts for The Preons. It’s interesting because these are three different instruments:
- Six string electric guitar (Fender Stratocaster) with a scale length of 25.5″
- Four string fretless bass (Warwick Corvette) with a scale length of 34″
- Five string fretted bass (Tony Levin model) with a scale length of 34″
These instruments are all pretty different and require different techniques. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover that my practice time on any of them seems to improve my playing on all of them. I’ve also noticed that my pitch detection and concept time-to-execution is much improved. There might be something to that old thing about practice…
One of my new approaches to practicing is to work on parts much more slowly than before. I am attempting to keep my tempo very controlled until I can execute the parts flawlessly, then I’ll develop speed. My guitar teacher in college told me “practice doesn’t make perfect. practice makes permanent.” It makes sense. Once errors are practiced repeatedly, they are much more difficult to address. So I’m putting in some miles with my instruments, getting ready for upcoming gigs and hoping to break through to the next level of my playing. Meedly meedly.