I landed a web programming job, started today. It's pretty fun.

Like I said last month, I'm not practicing full-time anymore. I've been cut down to 2-4 hours a day. That's not bad, but it's no 8-10. It'll be nice to work for money for a while, even if it's not in music yet. Especially after being Craigslist Jockey all month. I responded to over 70 job listings in 4 weeks.

Last time I was working and practicing guitar without playing in a band was the summer of 2004. I was a software engineering intern by day and working exclusively out of Shelton Berg's Jazz Improvisation: The Goal Note Method by night. (That's my favorite out of all the musical books I own.) I think I made more progress in my jazz playing during that summer than I did in this past year. I was focused on working out of a single book, and I was motivated by a specific goal: to get into Bobby Bradford's Jazz Ensemble at Pomona College in my final year at Mudd. It paid off.

I spent the first half of this year working for that LAMA scholarship. I'm proud of the demo videos I produced, and I started developing a unique playing style, but I wasn't studying as much jazz as I would have liked to. I think I'll shift my efforts in that direction again. I've been learning CSUN's and SDSU's repertoire of standards from my fake books (PDFs, all digital, w00t) for a couple weeks. I'm still only halfway through the Berg book, so I'll hit that for a few hours every night again.

»
Random Post
«