As I’ve said before, I have played guitar off and on for many years. I was in a lull with regards playing until about February or March of this year at which time I got real heavy into playing again.
I was practicing every night and learning new songs, some of which I had wanted to learn for a long time. I was going great guns, even through my move. I was insistent that I take at least one guitar in the car with me, and the day after I got here I went down and bought one, ok two, of the guitars I had been wanting.
Through the course of several events I got invited to a blues jam. I was excited to go and had a great time. At that event I got invited to another jam the next week at a different location. This second jam turned out to be a weekly thing.
I figured out quickly that I needed to learn some of the songs they knew so I would have something I could play with them and so they would be willing to play with me. It’s not that I’m a poor musician or a bad guitar player, I just play different stuff. I walked into the first jam and the sum of my knowledge of being able to play any blues songs was a basic 12-barre blues and my pentatonic scales in A minor.
I play rhythm guitar mostly so I really only had to learn the chords to the songs and for some of them that turned out to be pretty easy. So I learned some songs and finally got to play some of the good stuff with the guys. I felt like I knew what I was doing since I wasn’t learning the song on the spot.
I even learned a couple of songs I could sing since there weren’t a lot of singers showing up. Thing is, I’ve got a soft voice with a limited range so singing in public is always disappointing to me. And, as it turns out, it takes away from my enjoyment of the guitar playing. Which then makes for a very dissatisfying experience all around.
So I was going to these jams weekly for 6 or 7 weeks and I was working hard in between to learn more songs I could play at the jams. And I was starting to get resentful of going and I was getting frustrated and irritated. I didn’t realize it at first. Then, when I looked at the whole picture and tried to figure out why, I was able to see it. It was because I was trying so hard to fit in with these jam people by learning all the stuff they know that I was no longer getting the excitement out of learning the stuff I want to play. I kind of hit a point of burn out and threw myself off kilter.
It’s really my own fault. I think I made two mistakes. I’m not sure what order to put them in because I think they might have happened at the same time. One mistake was giving in to singing. Singing is not my first love musically, it is the guitar. I sing to accompany the guitar, I do not play guitar to accompany my singing.
The other mistake was not pacing myself better, both in going to the jams every week and in learning the songs they all know. I would have been better off to go to the first jam which is monthly and then go to the weekly jam every other week or so. And to choose one, maybe two songs a week to work on to build my repertoire of blues songs while I continued to learn the songs I want to learn.
Unfortunately, what throwing myself off has wrought is that I have picked up my guitar only twice in the last 10 days. That’s a bit frustrating and depressing in some ways. I was so excited about all of it, playing, learning new songs, getting to play with other people, discovering some of the songs that sound really complicated aren’t really. And I was excited about the growth and progress I could hear in my own playing.
As I seem to have, at least temporarily, lost most of that, I think it might be time for a mental reset to get some of it back. I don’t watch much TV and I’m running out of things to do in the evening.