Holy crap, you people got lucky. I just realized that about 60 posts that I had imported from another blogging service were still public/visible. I took care of that, you won’t have to go back and read those. Not that anyone is ever really digging into my blog any earlier than 2009 anyway….
But these were pretty bad. Stories of defeat, alcohol, guitars, death, depression, overcoming the hurdles and then finally redemption. Redemption, or at least the very least my blog posts became readable and I started taking it semi-seriously. I left a few posts here and there, but starting here, you can work your way forward. Not worth clicking, but you can see the progression. Lookit me now, custom header and everything. Big time. Thanks Abe Lincoln.
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As I was looking through some of the old blog pictures, I ran across some of my teen pictures. And wow, do I really feel old now. That stuff about feeling better when you get older, “I’ve never felt better in my life!” is a bunch of deluded crap. Or boomers trying to convince themselves it’s true. The only reason I feel better is because I work out now instead of letting my youthful metabolism do all the work. Shoot. This is getting depressing. Let’s try something else.
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Since I’ve been unusually quiet about guitar related matters, I’ll should note that my buddy let me try his copy of Rocksmith. This is the guitar-hero type game that you plug in your own guitar and play along to. He kept telling me how much he was playing, like hours a day. Anything that gets a guitar into your hands for hours a day is freaking great as far as I’m concerned. So I tried it out. Since I’ve (depressingly) been playing since the 80’s, I managed to barrel through a few of the songs in his game until it adjusted the difficulty mid-song. Seeing a C#7 chord get thrown in out of the blue (a chord I don’t think I’ve played in YEARS) was pretty crazy. It ramped up the speed and chord/single note difficulty on me until I just jacked the entire song up. Then it backed the speed down until I could just keep up. I liked that, although the main reason I ended up picking up the game was for the technique drills and scale practice. So far I’ve had the guitar in my hands for stretches up to two hours. It’s a really nice practice tool – even for players like me who have been playing for years (and admittedly have some rough spots technique wise). I’m getting a little lag on my system which is throwing me off a bit, but it’s still working out okay.
Rock on Peoples!