This is my documentation of the year between my 39th and 40th birthdays, spent trying to become a natural musician. My very first post gives you a pretty good idea of where I'm coming from and what my goals are.
In a nutshell, I am trying to get to the point where I can recognize everything that's being played on any stage - chord progressions, chord voicings, melodies, rhythms - and be able to draw on my own repertoire of these elements to play with the other musicians. I want to do this with a minimum of cognitive activity. This is how all the best natural musicians perform. The music simply flows from the soul.
I periodically record myself practicing with a webcam and post the videos on my YouTube "Channel". All the videos there are embedded in blog post here. Somewhere. Also all the videos link to the relevant post in the description on their respective YouTube pages.
I am doing this because I know that a lot of guitar players are in the same boat, and so might benefit from the lessons I learn. It seems that I am in a unique position - as an adult I can clearly see both sides of the hill that relatively few guitarists every crest, with my regrettable past of hacking through music running licks and playing cliches on one side, and just ahead of me the expansive territory of playing music naturally by ear. I think most players who become truly proficient, natural musicians do so much more intuitively than I am able to; in a sense I learned music wrong and now I am relearning music the natural way - the way most good players learn from other good players.
Part of my personal journey is the switch to what I call General Musical Tuning, which is explained here. There are plenty of criteria by which GMT is head-and-shoulders superior to Standard Tuning, but at the gut level it is valuable to me because it provides a more direct link between musical mind and musical instrument.
