So I picked up my guitar for the first time in 6 months...

Six months is a long time to not do something that requires practice.

I finally found some time to pull out the ole "gitters" and fool around a bit. I had to muster the energy though, because life as it is demands much of me. My son is 8 months old now and is really starting to explore his world through crawling. He looks like he's ready to start walking despite barely mastering the crawl! The job has its own demands as well, especially that of being awake all night. I felt like I could still rip the frets like I did this time last year, but I knew that the lack of practice was going to take away from the expected outcome.

I broke out the cherry sunburst ESP LTD first, since it was recently maintained and I hadn't played it since that date. My fingers started to hurt really quickly as the gauge of the strings is heavier than I'm used to. I could feel the urgency of my body as I tried to whip out some quick licks. Settling down a bit, I set my metronome to 80 beats per minute and patiently built up my speed and accuracy for that particular block of notes I needed to improve upon. Shortly I was able to play the part at around 115 bpm, but the song plays at about 150 bpm! I decided to give that a little break and move on to something else. Out came the 7-string ESP LTD guitar and while I recently replaced the strings, the fretboard was a bit dry and overall needed some cleaning. This made playing a struggle; sliding up and down the fretboard was akin to a car skidding down the roadway after the driver slammed the brakes. The sound from my very old practice amp also annoyed me to the point that I simply had to stop.

I'm going to go back to basics here and try to tackle some new concepts while my old (bad) habits are still out for retirement. I hope that very soon I can get back to playing the way I feel I should. Hopefully, videos will return to the blog and the original vision of this site will be restored!

Hopefully.