Making Lemonade

There is an American saying: "When life goes you lemons, make lemonade"

My "lemon" was the discovery of two new holes in my retina in early January, which meant I needed a second surgery on my eye and would have to start the recovery process all over again.  The recovery process starts with the removal of the protective eyepatch and receiving 3 different kinds of prescription eyedrops.  Most of the recovery time is waiting for the gas bubble that is put in the eye as part of the surgery to shrink.  It could take as much as two months for the bubble to dissipate completely.  While the bubble is there, I am required to maintain face down position as much as possible during waking hours, so that the bubble can act as a splint on the surgically repaired area.  In this case, "face down" means pointing the nose towards the ground.  This position also helps prevent the bubble from causing a cataract.  As the bubble shrinks, I can gauge if my head is at a sufficient angle by the bubble itself - if it appears as a line across my field of vision, I'm not "face down" enough.

The second surgery fortunately went fine.  This time I did not have a sore throat as a result of the general anesthesia process.  I have basically have a month of medical leave from my job.  Upon learning that a second surgery - and the restart of the recovery process - was imminent, I thought about how I would spend that month.  Between the first and second surgeries, I had spent my time playing a bit of guitar, messing around with iPad music apps, fooling a bit with my OP-1, and watching a lot of streaming TV shows.  I decided to use the time between the 2nd surgery and my return to work to improve my skills as a guitarist, with particular focus on expanding my repertoire - that is, the number of songs I can play on guitar without accompaniment.  This is the one non-electronic instrument I can play while adhering to "face down" position.

Becoming a better guitarist - this is the "lemonade" I am making.

This is what I've been working on as a guitarist:

1. "For All We Know", "Darn That Dream", and "My Funny Valentine" from the book Barry Galbraith Guitar Solos
2.  "We Three Kings" and "Away in a Manger" from the TrueFire course 335 Christmas.
3.  Cello Suite #2 Prelude by J.S. Bach, arranged for viola by Watson Forbes
4. A mix of technical exercises from the Two-Hand Groove Guitar and Creative Arpeggio Design courses.

The tunes in Galbraith book appear in order of difficulty, which made the decision on what tunes to learn first quite easy for me.  Thus, three jazz tunes I'm working on are the three easiest tunes in the book.  There are a bunch of different ways to learn how to play jazz, but the one thing that everybody has to do is learn jazz tunes and be able to play them competently.  Guitarists have to learn both the melody and the chord progression for each tune.  The "chord-melody" approach is how guitarists can work on both the melody and the chords for a tune at the same time, in such a way that the tune can be played on one guitar, without accompaniment and at the same making the listener feel like nothing is missing..  This Galbraith book is well-regarded for its chord-melody arrangements of 13 jazz tunes that just about every pro jazz player is expected to know.  So the primary goal at the moment is to simply memorize and play each tune with good time and no serious mistakes.  The next goal would be to learn why particular harmonies were chosen in the construction of these arrangements.  Galbraith added passing chords here and there, and elected to use chord inversions instead of always using root position chords.  The study of these harmonies should yield ideas for jazzing up pop songs, jazzing up Christmas carols,  as well as of course creating original music.  A lot of jazz improvisations are built off of deep understanding of the harmony as well.

The course 335 Christmas includes 5 Christmas carols, arranged by Larry Carlton in a jazzed up style for solo guitar - again these can be played without accompaniment.  The goal here is to be able to play all 5 tunes by next Christmas.  I've always been caught every Christmas without knowing how to play carols - time I did something about that.

I can't play my viola and maintain "face down" at the same time.  This is one reason I've been playing the guitar so much.  I've wanted to learn Cello Suite #2 on the viola because it sounds kind of dark and gothic compared to the much more popular Cello Suite #1 Prelude.  Thus, I'm reading this piece on the guitar.  The focus is not so much on guitar picking technique as it is on reading standard music notation and seeing how much of this prelude I can get into my head so that when I'm able to play viola again, I have a little better idea of how the music is supposed to sound.

The Two Hand Groove Guitar course features Ben Lacy teaching how to play a bass line and "drum" parts simultaneously, while also adding chords on top of all of that.  My progress in this course has been pretty slow because making my left and right hands do separate things at the same time does not come naturally to me.  I did however get the "Rosanna" drum parts fairly down.  Now I'm working on playing a simple Latin bass line and a basic kick and snare drum part at the same time.  I do want to go somewhere with these concepts eventually, perhaps by the time I reach the end of the course, I may have improved enough on the chord-melody side of guitar playing to effectively incorporate that with this two-hand groove stuff.

Before I had all day to practice guitar playing, every day, I had allocated my guitar practice time increasingly towards learning song arrangements for solo guitar.  To be able to play blazing single-note guitar solos like Allan Holdsworth, John McLaughlin, etc. requires a considerable amount of practice time, and this was time I would rather spend on building a good repertoire of songs.  Playing a complete-sounding arrangement of a song - with at least the melody and harmony at the same time - requires just about as much practice as the virtuosic single-note soloing aspect of guitar playing.  The more parts of a song you want to play simultaneously, the harder it gets.   That all said, I was intrigued when the Creative Arpeggio Design course was released, because Tim Miller stated that he'd figured out a way to play particular types of lines used by particular jazz pianists that have been very difficult to play on guitar.  The method taught in this course is elegant in its simplicity of concept but requires a fair amount of practice because I'm not used to moving my fingers that way.  It does indeed lend itself to unusual sounding lines.  I will try to get these sounds into my head, and later reproduce them by ear on the viola and electric violin, which are the instruments I prefer to use over guitar for single-note soloing, even though they are harder instruments to play.