The glory of practice

The past week or so I've been spending about an hour a day (with a metronome, of course) practicing really fundamental guitar thingies. Very fundamental...as in alternating two notes repeatedly for ten minutes, increasing speed, until I can do it completely cleanly.

I don't know how much of a difference it will make in how I sound (I'm hoping it will), but in how I FEEL when I'm playing--my level of comfort, the ease with which I feel musical ideas coming from me--it's made a huge difference in even such a tiny amount of time. There's something really amazing about knowing that if you're willing to put in that work the right way, you'll get better. It's like magic...and as strange as it sounds, knowing exactly how the neurons in the motor cortex and caudate nucleus and blah blah blah are encoding that practice and strengthening their connections gives me more motivation than ever to do it.

I always had a theoretical and somewhat begrudging respect for the power of simple and constant practice, but its only recently that I've really come to understand its power. I'm addicted now--feeling results like that after a week just makes me want to do more.