Should it sound like music?

I had another epiphany. Lately, things have been sounding a little more like music and I'd been taking that as a good sign.

Then I began thinking about my son and his violin. He's been playing for years and, over the years, it's sounded more and less like music. At the very beginning, it had lots of rough patches and, though I was proud of every note, sometimes, it was a stretch to find music in there. Later, it sounded like music a lot, and this lasted up until fairly recently. Of late, though, he seems to often work on bizarre scales and exercises that don't sound like music. I suppose the difference is that the bizarre scales aren't supposed to sound like music.

So the issue is this: if this is the typical continuum, where am I on it? I'm thinking I'm at that first break between initial non-musical and musical.

I guess the moral is that the more progress I make, the longer the path to where I want to be seems.

Rhythm

I'm back from my trip, a week away from the guitar and no noticeable backsliding.

I've been working through the Shipton book (described in an earlier post). I'm up to the third part and had been having trouble with some of the fancy syncopated strums. I had a little epiphany today though. I noticed that if I just hold one chord shape it's easier to figure out the strumming pattern, than if I'm trying to do the chord changes at the same time.

This is probably the most obvious thing in the world, but it's fairly typical of my epiphanies!

Hiatus

I'm off to an international conference for a week and, because of all the other carry-ons I'm taking, I'm leaving the travel guitar behind. This may be the first break from daily practice since the beginning of the year.

I'm going to miss it and I worry that I'll backslide.

There's research that shows that appropriate "visualization" can help more than actual practice in some kinds of learning. I don't think the learning involved is middle-aged guitar, but I'm hoping it'll generalize.