I just spent a week in Kansas helping a friend with a rebuild project, but nothing in that kept me from taking a couple of guitars with me. My friend's son is an excellent guitarist, a natural musician for whom playing well just seems to come easy, but it's not that way for me.

I did find an activity that emphasized to me how much I have learned, though, and I'd like to share it.

I mention in my posts that playing guitar for me involves very little watching of the left hand. Most of the time I play in the dark, with my eyes closed, visualizing whatever "movie" might just pop into my head at that particular time, relative to that particular song, but on this trip my friend and I got to spend some time alone for a change and he wanted to talk. No surprise that I wanted to play the guitar, which usually is a recipe for disaster, but this time it worked. I did what I encourage others to try, let the hands go to automatic, and paid attention to the conversation. I mean full attention, with eye contact, reciprocal conversation, humor, sarcasm, disagreement, the whole gamut of activity involved in a vigorous conversation. The only thing different was that I was playing all the while, fingerstyle, and listening out of one ear to how it went. Surprisingly, it went incredibly well. My timing was on, I made very few mistakes, I even varied the volume at the places I usually do when I dedicate full attention to playing the piece.

I mention all this to bring up the essential question we all face--how do we know when we have learned a song, learned it well enough that it is automatic, learned it well enough we won't have to reacquaint ourselves with the chord progression the next time we want to play it. I'd suggest that you try this technique--I think that question will be answered by this exercise.

I'm not married, so I don't have a wife to try this with, but having had 3 wives in the past, I might mention that it might not be the best idea to try it out on them. If you are unsuccessful, they will P&M b/c you obviously arent' paying your full attention to them, if you are successful they'll still P&M b/c you obviously aren't paying attention to them or you wouldn't be able to get the song right.

.......sigh.

There's no win-win in that situation, is there?

Find a friend, one good enough that you can disagree with him, call him out of his position, and have a vigorous argument, while you are playing one of your pieces--you'll know if you've learned it or not very quickly.

It worked for me, here's hoping it will work for you.

Dugly