Posture

I haven't posted in years, so I thought I'd post something new.

I'm still playing the guitar of course.

My latest focus has been on posture and how I hold the instrument. I realize that I hunch quite a bit and tilt the guitar upward. Neither of these are good habits, so I'm working on correcting both...which of course means relearning lots of things!

Gitâr

I haven't posted in a long time, but I was thinking it would be nice to post something about the connection between my posture and my playing.

With that in mind, I went back to the blog to discover that the last thing I posted was also about posture!

As long as I'm here, I should post something, so here goes. I've had a bit of trouble with my wrists the last few weeks, nothing big, but some soreness, so I've been taking it easy. Usually, I play a lot over the winter holiday, but because of the wrists, I've been holding back. It's the end of break and the wrists feel pretty good now.

Oh, and the title of this post is in Welsh, because Welsh is iaith y nefoedd, 'the langauge of the heavens'.

Strumming

I had sabbatical in the spring and then summer break, so lots of time for guitar, working out, research, hanging around the house in my jammies.

But now I'm teaching again in a few days. I'm looking forward to the class, Statistical Natural Language Processing, but I'm not looking forward to less guitar and exercise.

I think my latest epiphany is a "re-epiphany": don't strum at an angle. I think I tend to slump over the guitar which leads to sloppy strumming. I just notice the strumming doesn't sound so good, but I don't know why. It's always the bad habits though, the ones we think we work ourselves out of only to find them back again.

A new one

I got a new (used) guitar!

It's a Seagull "Entourage Rustic Grand", a small parlor-body guitar. Diane bought it for me as an early birthday present when we were passing through Phoenix a week or so ago.

Picture to the right. Light-colored wood, cherry-laminate body. I love it! It's definitely not something to strum a lot on, doesn't have the bass of the dreadnoughts, but for plucky things it's super fun. The neck is a standard length, but slightly narrower. I think the standard nut is 1.75 inches and this is 1.72.

It came with a soft case with backpack straps, like the travel guitar. My plan is to not keep it humidified in the case. Since it's used, it may very well never have been kept humidified. I'm not even sure how effective a humidifier would be in a soft case.

I'm on sabbatical this term and the plan has been to take one of the guitars out in the morning and keep it out all day, so while I'm working on things I can take little guitar breaks all day long. This has worked out quite well. I have a number of new pieces I'm working on and nicely sore fingers/hands.

Ar yr arfordir (on the coast)

I'm on sabbatical this term and my wife only has online classes, so we're taking a few days on the California coast in a little town called Cambria. We've been here a number of times: nice restaurants, quaint, but the main attraction is that we can afford to spend too much to rent a place where we can see and hear the ocean.

The reason this is relevant is that it's much more humid here than at home, humid enough that I can leave my guitar out of its case. (Our home is Tucson where it's way too dry to leave the instrument unhumidified out of the case.)

The other reason it's relevant is that, because this is a rental, there's lots of room to leave guitar, music, etc. out.

What I've found is that this really helps the practice. I find that I can wander back and forth between guitar and other activities all day long.

I'm thinking this means we have to find a way to humidify the house in Tucson?

Or I should just leave my everyday guitar out of the case all the time?

Hiatus

It may look like I've taken one, but not so. I just haven't had much of a chance to post recently. What's new in the interim? I'm still playing, practicing many of the same pieces. I've gotten hooked on the Welsh language, the most relevant aspect of which is that I can say guitar in Welsh: gitâr. My latest epiphany is that practicing the same things a lot, I find I get sloppy with my fingering. I went through a bunch of old pieces the other day just trying to fret them properly and was amazed at how much better they sound.

Plateau

Still working on Ode to Joy....seriously plateauing. I need to find something new and fun to play.