Today is a rainy day, and I am using that as an excuse to not go anywhere. I don’t know why I would need an excuse, though - I hardly go anywhere as it is. In any event, here I am at the keyboard again.

I was poking through Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style this morning, just refreshing my mind on a few writing conventions. A book like this is really about how to best edit one’s writing, but my freewriting can also improve by simply increasing my understanding of sentence structure and punctuation. The way I feel about this book with regard to freewriting is similar to the way Charlie Parker once described how to improvise: you learn scales and chords, practice for years, but when it is time to play you forget all that shit and just blow (I’m paraphrasing very loosely, of course). With Strunk and White it is good to learn some writing best practices, but when freewriting it is best to forget the details of what you have learned.

That being said, I really do have a fairly limited repertoire of sentence structures while I am freewriting. I would like to improve on this, bearing in mind, of course, that anything I write can be revised later. As much as I can get right the first time, though, the better.

I’ve also been looking at YouTube videos today of various people teaching Soukous and Afrobeat guitar parts (funny. The spell check function for Atom recognizes the word Soukous, but not Afrobeat). It’s amazing how much good and bad stuff is out there. One guy really ran down the proper right hand technique for the seben part of Soukous such that I now feel confident I can practice it on my own. Another guy played his guitar parts along with a recording of Fela’s music, but his guitar was out of tune with the recording. Very irritating indeed.

Another guy still did a series of fascinating transcriptions of Fela’s compositions, presenting them as screencasts while playing various individual instruments and sections of instruments on Sibelius. I could easily do a screencast of “Mr. Follow Follow” - I have the transcription in Finale. I suppose the real benefit, though, is in doing the actual transcription. I really should get back to charting out some of these tunes. I like that I was able to get every instrument with my transcription of “Mr. Follow Follow.” At the very least I should transcribe the rhythm section parts.

Thinking about my musical practice there are several areas I need to work on:

  1. Musicianship
    • ear training
    • sight singing
    • tonal hearing
    • transcription * reading
    • scores
    • lead sheets * piano
  2. Instrumental technique
    • guitar
  3. Repertoire
    • guitar
  4. Composition

I need to somehow combine this list of skills into one or two daily practice activities so I don’t get overwhelmed by it all. My last spell of practicing had me memorizing a bunch of chord solos. I need to get back to that as well as getting back to transcribing and composing.

Let me think on this for a bit.