I watched a video this morning about learning to play guitar later in life. While I'm certainly not learning guitar from the ground up and I'm maybe a bit young for the audience he was trying to reach. But I'm in this phase where I'm looking for a bit of advice to bump things up a bit. One of his suggestions was to review what you're doing every 90 days. Well today's post is a bit of a review, but it hasn't been quite 90 days.
I've had a recent fascination with little acoustic guitars. My open-mic wingman, Dustin uses a really little guitar and it has the most interesting tone to it. It's not all big and bassy to be sure, but there's a purity to it that I really like.
I've got a couple of projects coming up and some philosophies I've been considering of late and it's led me down a path I hadn't planned on going down at this time - coming up with some covers to play.
I hinted at it in my last blog post, but it's now official: I'm on YouTube! I've had a few videos posted on the platform for a while but that was with my personal YouTube account. I took some time this week to convert an unused channel I had to this project and got my first video posted today. Again, it's a song I've had posted previously, but I went in the yard and did a new performance for your enjoyment:
I've spent the last week or so really struggling with the commitment to develop 5 polished minutes of my music that I made in a previous blog post.
It's March 1 and my first ever February Album Writing Month challenge is complete. I am already starting to feel a sense of emptiness, and I'm not really trying to be hyperbolic. I've spent most of my weekends and evenings over the last month with a guitar in hand and lyrics in front of me. I woke up this morning and didn't have that spot to immediately head to. So I guess I'll blog about it.
I've been making the rounds at open mics whenever I can and the most consistent feedback I'm getting is that my songs are funny and entertaining, the kazoo is great an I need to polish up what I'm doing.
Sorry for teasing this so much over the past few days. The fact is, I've been sitting at 13 songs since Sunday and wanted to get #14 down before the update. And I finished it last night!
Happy International Kazoo Day! Yes, that's the second kazoo day this year. The one in January is National, the one today is International. I've got a little song here for you that will explain why I'm much more likely to celebrate the International version from here on rather than the American-rooted National Kazoo Day.
I know I should be updating you on my FAWM progress - and that will probably come tomorrow. But for now I have bigger news:I GOT A NEW GUITAR!
Week 1 of FAWM is over and my GOODNESS what a week it's been. As of yesterday (Feb 9), I have completed 10 of my 14 tracks. So I'm on pace to make my 14 tracks by next weekend - and could have as many as 28 songs by the time this is done. That's a pretty cool place to be! But I've seen a few people taking the challenge who are over 100 songs already. I followed one guy and my feed is just full of his songs. I wonder if those songs ever become something other than a post on the FAWM website?
After much anticipation, I've dived into my first February Album Writing Month challenge. FAWM is an annual challenge to write and demo an album worth of material (14 songs) in one month (28 days). It sounds like a daunting challenge but an achievable one too.
