time and space

The major difficulty a practicing guitarist faces has nothing to do with songs, chord forms or sound. The major difficulty has to do with finding or making the circumstances which make regular practice possible. 


Real achievement requires many hours and each who has the desire to learn the guitar must find a way to weave regular practice into the fabric of daily life. There's no other way to satisfy that desire. Talent has nothing to do with making progress. An expensive instrument has nothing to do with making progress. Regular, sustained practice is what makes progress.


Where in your schedule can you find an hour five days a week to practice? Maybe you can only find three. Maybe it's twenty minutes, and not an hour. The length of the time spent working on your music is less important than the frequency with which you return to your practice. 


Think for a minute, about the demands on your time. Job, school and family responsibilities are the main ones, and time spent in these areas isn't very often negotiable. If your time is tight, expect to make a different sort of progress than one who has fewer responsibilities and lots of flexible time available. 


In the place where you live, where is there a quiet spot? Maybe there's a room, or a corner of a room that you can turn into your music space. I have a comfortable chair and a small desk in mine. On my desk I can spread out written pages better than I was able on my old music stand. But fussing with my music stand was still better than using the floor or the busy kitchen table. On another counter in my room is a nice stereo for listening to all kinds of music. I used to use a portable boom box for studying recorded music I want to learn. It was right on my desk and at my finger tips. Nowadays I use a lap top computer for replaying specific passages of a CD. Bookshelves organize my music books, notebooks and old lps. I still have a cassette rack and a CD shelf so all my important stuff is available and easy to find. 


I bought a used two-drawer file cabinet some years back to store the things I have written out. File folders of songs, ideas for songs, completed arrangements and other notes fill one entire drawer. In the other I keep a collection of news clips, magazine articles, pictures, different kinds of hand outs and other information I feel pertinent to my music practice. My cabinet bulges.


The walls of my music room are covered with things. Maybe two-dozen framed photographs of guitar heroes, friends and people with whom I have made music. There are several beautiful prints, some posters and other drawings and paintings given to me as presents. There are some plaques awarded me for one reason or another and a couple of poems, nicely printed and framed, hanging on my wall too. Knick-knacks and other memorabilia have over the years, found their way to the tops of bookshelves, into drawers and into the crannies and corners of my music room. Some of it is junk really. But to me, a kind of treasure. All this stuff reminds me to practice well and work hard. 


Over time, music space evolves. It is the place where thoughts get thunk, where work gets done and ideas are born into the world as guitar music. Your music space is a laboratory where discoveries are made and it is a blacksmith shop where things get hammered into shape. It becomes all the places you have already been and it becomes everywhere you want to go. 


Your music space is the private place where the sometimes holy art of practice becomes manifest. Let's go back to work.