I've to put a pause on practice the last 2 weeks due to moving - most of my after work evenings were spent sorting and hauling off stuff either to the trash or to the temporary storage unit, and on weekends it was more of the same, leaving me too brain tired to consider practice.
The break has been good in other ways:
- I've taken the free time to start reading Play It Again by Alan Rusbridger - and enjoying it alot. As someone at the early steps of middle age, or to quote Carl Jung, coming into the "afternoon of life", I like the affirmation that culture (and in particular music) is an area worth exploring and working towards.
- I've started to retrain my right hand under the guidance of Fernando Perez - starting with a lot of finger tapping on the tabletop.
Retraining the right hand
The crux of the issue here is I've taken up towards compensations - in particular using my middle finger joints to pick the strings instead engaging the movement from my knuckles, which is more efficient mechanically speaking. But since I've been active again on the guitar for the last 6 months, there is a fair amount of automatisms built in at this juncture, so to help with retraining, I've been given a set of exercises to do away from the guitar for the time being in hopes of getting my brain and hand to relearn, and to some extent, uninstall the automatisms.
It's intensely boring to be honest - I have to be fully engaged during these exercises since it's a relearning where the brain is involved. I can only say I hope I get over the hill and get back to the guitar with a more efficient right hand and keep it that way!