139 (75%) Yes 45 (24%) Just Starting 1 ( 1%) No
Well this is a guitar site after all, so not surprises there. But the ratio of Yes to Just Starting, of one in four people are "Just Starting" tells us something. Okay, maybe it tells us nothing. What one person considers "Just Starting" will differ from the next. And even then, if we said that once you can swap fluently between strumming G to C to D you were no longer "Just starting", there is still no real information in that statistic. One of the trickiest parts of polls is that your information is already in a subset of people who click on polls! :)
One day I might have enough information from polls to deduce something; for now it's just kinda fun. I've popped up another simple poll - let me predict the results right now: "Is this your first visit to this site?" Yes will be 75%, No will be 15% and "I don't know" will be 10%. Let's see how I go!
On the guitar front, I'm in the steady state of not much going on at all. I'm still playing for 2-2.5hours at BBar every Thursday night and am still enjoying it. I have a few regulars that I see every week or every second week, and a few people that I've seen before once or twice. Mostly they are all new people, when I chat to them the common response is "I really enjoyed that!" It might be true, or it might be standard Aussie politeness. Us Aussies aren't very good at criticism, which isn't good, we need to learn how to say what we feel. Aussies criticise with their feet - that is, they leave, say nothing, and never return. Nobody gets to learn from that response!
I'm comfortable enough at BBar now that given the right "mood" (both the audience and my mood) I will play stuff I haven't perfected. Yep, that's right, practising! Even if I'm fumbling around with it. Not much though, I still want to seem professional, but a bit of "raw edge" isn't scorned upon. The trick seems to be to make it look like you aren't practising - so play through your mistakes, don't pause, if you are going to repeat a section because you muffed it up and what to try again, do it, but on beat. A few new pieces and some old forgotten ones are finding their way back in. My set is now 2.5hrs long, so I normally don't get to play the entire thing. This is good, it means I can tune the set to meet the crowd. It's also bad, because I don't freshen up my songs every week.
What gigging does mean for my guitar life (which is still very limited due to work and family commitments) is that the gig is everything at the moment. In the last three weeks I have only played guitar three times...so although I'm enjoying the performing (and polishing/practising my set list) I'm not creating anything new. Which is all I used to do.
Times and seasons. The season at the moment is performing to audiences, and seeing as I haven't spent much of my guitar life doing it, I'm happy to keep it just at that for now!
JAW
Glad to see your still at it :)
ReplyDeleteWish I could see one of your shows.