When Covid-19 hit, I’d been looking to do a bunch of gigs – some gigs of just my own original music, some “one man band” cover gigs, and maybe even getting into some type of unofficial cover band.  All that went out the window, so instead I started a YouTube channel.

The channel is fun – it’s a grind to put out a video each week, but it’s kind of a fun grind.  But it has seriously cut into my practice time, my writing time, and my recording time.  And practicing and recording are two ways to get better.  Instead I’m watching my playing get worse.  It doesn’t help that I’m 55.

For me, the first thing to go is timing and the second thing is how cleanly I play.  I’m not a naturally coordinated person – I’ve always sucked at every kind of sport.  I’ve never had fast twitch fine motor skills – I can’t play a trill on a piano, I can’t do a fast vibrato on guitar.  I don’t have a great voice, and it’s hard for me to sing in tune.  I don’t have the physical tools to be a great musician/singer.  What I do have is a strong sense of melody and a strong internal drive to do music in whatever shape/form is available.  If there were nothing in the house but a violin, I’d teach myself violin.  If there were no instruments, I’d look around and make one, somehow.

But listening back to myself playing on my YouTube channel is at times difficult – some of it sounds fine, but I hear the glitches in my sense of timing, and it’s super easy to hear my sloppiness on lead playing.  I’m the guy who has to keep the leads relatively simple, but I need to play with better timing and play more cleanly.

The fix for me is to move to more practicing and recording.  Some of that might be interesting to my currently tiny YouTube audience of 158 subscribers.  I have made a two year commitment to doing YouTube, after which I will reevaluate and see where things are.  But two years should be enough for me to document most of the stuff on my mind about guitars.

So the challenge is to get in more practicing but keep up the channel.  Right now, it’s a doable thing because I’m NOT doing any gigs until we get a vaccine.  So I’m thinking maybe April of 2021, but it depends on a lot of things.  I don’t want some vaccine that was rushed to the market for political reasons – I won’t be first in line.  That’s not politics – that’s common sense.

In the meantime, I’m thinking my next video will be about how my skills are in decline and what I intend to do about it!