When I started this blog way back in 2020 I really expected it to be a big part of my guitar playing journey. As can be seen by the fact that the most recent post prior to this one is from 2021 it is clear things didn’t quite go according to plan (in fact that guitar in the photo for that post is one I sold over a year ago). As with a lot of things, life can just get in the way. Which isn’t to say I haven’t been playing guitar but rather I haven’t had the self-discipline needed to keep this blog going.
Gigging in 2023
It’s fair to say I had given up on the blog. Last year was a particularly busy year with my band The Fuzz Tones as we ended up doing a gig most months, finishing with a wedding in October. The gigging was great and resulted in us trying many different songs to try and settle on a setlist that would work for most local venues. That actually meant that I spent most of my time learning songs for the band and not spending as much time on my own personal goals.
Gigs haven’t quite kicked back in yet but the band now has a solid pool of songs to pull from should we be asked to play anytime soon. We’ve all agreed that this setlist is more than enough and allows us to mix and match songs to suit the venue and crowd as needed. This now frees us up to explore other things. For me personally I have just completed my 6th year since I started playing guitar again. I definitely can see the improvements from when I first picked up my guitar on New Year’s Eve 2017 but lately I have also seen me not push myself as much as I did at the start of this journey. Of course that is offset by the fact that I have now played a lot more live gigs than I thought I would have and that’s invaluable experience.
18 Months…
As I sit now with 6 years of playing and a solid year of gigging under my belt I am looking ahead to which direction I want to take next on my guitar playing journey. As I said earlier, I definitely became less focused on my personal guitar playing last year with the focus being on the band. I certainly learnt a lot in preparing for those gigs and I wouldn’t change any of that as live gigging experience is invaluable but I definitely took a step back from focused practice sessions that were more common in the first couple of years of playing and that’s something I want to change going forward.
So what then is the plan? I have decided to give myself 18 months to really go hard with the guitar playing. Something that might not be known by some is that my day job is as a web developer. I work for a local digital marketing agency as the head of web development and while it’s a job that I enjoy (and that was once a hobby for me) a lot of learning is needed outside of working hours to stay on top of learning new things. This is also something that I have struggled with lately as I haven’t been pushing my own learning in that regards. There are still a lot of things there that I really want to dive into and explore and it can be just as confusing as learning guitar.
Rather than wrestle between both of those things I have decided to mostly park my web learning in favour of guitar learning. I won’t stop the web learning completely as I still need to be able to learn new things as the job calls for it, but I do feel that I can limit this for a period of 18 months while I work on my guitar playing and to devote as much of my free time as I can to obsessively getting better!
A Student of the Blues
I have gone back and forth on a few different paths to commit to, at one point even considering going deep into Van Halen territory and learning as much as I can from the late, great Eddie Van Halen himself, but after recently watching a local blues show put on by friends of mine I have decided to double down on the namesake of this very blog, that of the blues!
I want to, in essence, become a student of the blues and to treat things as such. This is also why I used the term “obsessively” earlier. I don’t just want to casually noodle on some pentatonic licks and play random stuff over a 12 bar blues, I want to deeply understand the blues language, how it works and how to speak it. I once heard someone refer to learning guitar solos as being able to read the words from a french book without actually understanding the words you are reading. I now want to learn that language and become fluent in it.
The Plan…
I see 3 main areas to cover in this path, namely learning songs, learning theory and learning techniques. Out of all of those things, learning songs and deconstructing them is probably the most important item on the list, however the other 2 items can support this. For example knowing the chords in a blues song and learning the guitar solo note for note is all well and good but having the knowledge to improvise your own meaningful solo over that combining knowledge and technique is what allows someone to express blues in their own way, and that’s what I want to be able to do.
How am I going to achieve this? Whilst I haven’t sat down and wrote out any kind of structured path, I do have quite a lot of resources that I have accumulated over the past 6 years. I have instructional courses that I purchased from the likes of Truefire that are mostly blues or blues rock oriented. I plan on finally working my way through these and to treat them as if they were lectures for a university course that I have spent my own money on. My intentions are not to blast through these and get them done as quickly as possible. I want to really understand the material before moving on with things. Which is something I then want to feed back into this blog. In 18 months I want to be able to look back on this blog and see my journey documented over that period of time.
I also have courses that I have bought which break down albums from artists including Stevie Ray Vaughan, Rory Gallagher and Gary Moore. If I actually took the time to work through all of those in detail and that was all I did I think it would help me make huge gains in my playing. There are of course other great blues artists whose music I can learn from as well and while I appreciate the importance of developing my ear I think the guided learning courses will help me get there faster. Those courses are essentially going to act as my instructors for the next 18 months.
Wrapping Up…
As I write this I don’t know the structure that I am going to take with this. I have the material which is great but I need some sort of system that I can follow which allows me to progress and track my progress. Similar to going to the gym, you want some sort of program to follow that progressively overloads you in a structured and considered way rather than just winging it. That might be a great topic for my next blog post actually. I don’t want to commit to this until I have some sort of plan mapped out. I am not an ad hoc kind of person. I am systems and process driven. That’s just how my brain works. Blame the 2 decades of web development if you will.
I will sign off now. This is intended to be the first blog that moves things forward and will hopefully be the first of many as the coming weeks and months pass by.
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