oh, banjobarb. the class laughed delightedly when you declared 'don't look at me!', mostly because the rest of us weren't feeling like we particularly wanted to be looked at either. certainly *i* didn't want any attention.
this week there was good, and there was bad. as we learned a few measures of the song at a time and then played them back, i thought 'hey! this is going well!' we learned maybe three or four sections like this. and then our teacher was like, now let's go back and integrate the things we learned half an hour ago, and put it all together! and i was like -- DUDE. i'm OLD now. i seriously don't have those powers of recall at this point. sure, twenty minutes ago i was rocking the shit out of those two measures, but now? i had no idea what the hell i'd been playing. during that stretch of class, i'm pretty sure when the instructor said 'come on now, if you can't remember, just strum something -- anything!' he was looking at me. i sort of shut down and just looked around with a charles-whatnow? expression on my face.
BUT!
then he passed out a sheet with the tablature. okay, as a flute player, a little bit of analysis was required. this looks a lot different than any of the written music i've ever looked at. but since i could actually tell what was supposed to happen next in the song without relying on my less-than-awesome memory (i think my brain is too full of incident numbers and crappy pop-culture trivia, like the names of all of the original members of new edition), it made things WAY easier. i think maybe he didn't give it to us originally so we'd be more engaged in class and would be more likely to watch his technique and how we were doing it as opposed to just staring at the music? anyway. super helpful. i'm still not awesome, but the more i practice the more natural it feels. so, i can almost play one whole song, you guys! and, i'm pretty sure everyone in my building now hates that song. you're welcome!
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