Last night in my guitar class, my teacher Vinnie talked about practicing and how, to be most effective, we’ve got to “roast the turkey.”
A properly roasted turkey takes about 3.5 hours to cook at 425° F. If your goal is a golden, juicy, well-cooked bird, there’s no way around this. Say you want to save on gas, so you put the heat at 200° F. You’ll have to leave the turkey in the oven a very long time to bring it to the right temperature for cooking, and even then it won’t be very good. Or say you want to cook it quickly, so you turn the heat to 600° F. Your bird will cook unevenly, burnt on the outside and not quite done on the inside.
So it goes with practice. If you do a little here and there, you’ll get better. But it’ll take a long time, and you’ll probably feel that your skills atrophy between practices. If you’re cramming by practicing hours and hours a day, you will see quick progress, but you’ll likely burn out.
I’ve been posting on here weekly, on Wednesdays at 9 a.m. I’m trying to return to a practice of writing, and having some output each week feels right. Gotta roast my turkeys.
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