Covid got me to do what I've always wanted to do.

For so many years, I’ve been training as a musician. I’ve gained so much experience from the practice room, the rehearsal sessions and the stage. I’ve been interested in home recording for years and wanted to get into doing it more regularly. But life happens, or more importantly, I develop and get connected to distractions in my life that won’t necessarily make me a better musician or human, in my opinion…. youtube binges, netflix distractions, or just whatever other ways I waste time.

I’m not necessarily a deep believer in striving to be productive all the time, literally every moment that I am awake. I’ve been trying to learn to just be more often than before, but I do feel that since my time on this earth is finite that I do have a desire to be fairly productive most of the time. I’ve always wanted to get more into home recording and since we’ve been home from in-person teaching experiences for the last several months, I’ve actually taken on a project that I was not expecting to be such a large undertaking once I started it.

I began with doing some play-alongs that were based on the 12-bar blues and at first, it felt like I had to go with the Major blues since this was how I introduced the blues to my students. At first, I thought I would probably just make a few tracks and leave it at that. Then I realized that it would be a good opportunity to take video of the performances and put them into a multi-panel video. So I made a few at first, but then realized that if I want this to be an effective resource, there should be tracks/videos in all 12 keys. So okay, I’ll be doing 12 videos of these. Not a big deal. Then I started getting into bass lines that were based in minor keys, so then I decided I should do in minor keys also. So just like that, the project became an undertaking of 24 tracks and videos. I’ve been working on them all summer long, well after my obligation to my teaching position ended. But I also just really enjoy that this is how I contribute to my body of work regarding music. This is how I want to spend my time. The video editing in not so fun, but then again, I enjoy a lot of so much of this process, especially learning about getting into music styles that I’m not so good at and have to learn to do in general.

If you want to see any videos about getting into playing over the blues or access these blues tracks/videos, go my page “12 Bar Blues” on my website here and you can find the links there.