a lifetime burning

By Sheol

In the pink

What weird weather we are having, when the sun hasn't been shining, it has been trying to snow!

I've been playing a fair bit of guitar recently.  6 years ago I was lucky enough to attend a weekend masterclass on electric blues guitar playing with  Professor Tomo Fujita of Berklee College of Music and Matt Schofield an electric blues guitar virtuoso.

Tomo asked us to individually consider who our 5 favourite blues guitarists were, and then what were our 5 favourite blues albums.  If you chose an album not by one of your selected guitarists then you needed to rethink your first answer.  You then had to refine that list down to your favourite 5 tracks, which would represent your blues core.  Again, if you picked a track that wasn't on one of the 5 albums then you needed to rethink your earlier answer.   


Finally from this list of 5 you had to decide what you needed to learn, in order to be able to play the blues better.  


I could not answer those questions at the time. Tomo smiled at me and said with an air of sadness, that if I did not know what I wanted to learn, then he was not able to teach it to me.  


It was a salutary lesson in the importance of focusing on what it is that you want to achieve.  On editing and refining, on cutting deeper not wider.  


It occurs to me, belatedly that I probably need to apply that discipline to my efforts go become a better photographer too ....

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