I’ve had a lifelong interest in music, but for most of my life so far I’ve been pretty “bad” at it. This year I decided to do something about that. I don’t usually think in terms of New Year’s resolutions, but that’s roughly what this was: I decided that I would post a video every week of myself singing and playing a song on some sort of chorded instrument. We’re more than halfway through the year, and I’ve stuck with this every week (only posting late a few times).

While there are some good reasons not to tell people about your goals in some instances, I went ahead and described this project on Facebook:

I’m a bit nervous putting this here, but those nerves are part of the point of the exercise. I’m going to post one cover per week in 2016. I think Sundays are the best time to do so, as it gives me the whole week to practice and the weekend to actually get something recorded. The rules are as follows: I must sing, and play a chordy-instrument, simultaneously. It can suck awfully, the priority is forcing myself to make the song happen. A “chordy-instrument” is here defined as “an instrument that plays chords” — I’ve got a tenor banjo, a soprano ukulele, more guitars than I can shake a stick at, and a couple of keyboards on hand — any of those is fine. I’ve got a lot of bass experience under my belt, and so I’m basically considering melody-only stuff to be cheating (though I’m probably going to give myself a pass sometime in February to do a cover of Death From Above 1979’s “Black History Month”.) The point is to expand my comfort zone until I can fake my way through the singer-songwriter thing. I’d love to be able to do some carols next holiday season, and to be roughly prepared by that point in time to do an open-mic night somewhere.

My reasoning behind posting this was that the big reason for not stating goals publicly is that doing so can feel like you’re making progress towards your goal, when in fact you aren’t. I figured that I was in the clear: there was no way to pretend that having let people know about my intention would feel like making progress, since it was a necessarily ongoing project. To be on the safe side, I also held off on posting that description on January 1st — I waited until the 3rd and posted it alongside my first cover (Songs: Ohia’s Cabwaylingo).

The first big leap was simply figuring out how to sing and play at the same time. Before I began this project, I’d been playing around some with a ukulele. (This was a gift from my girlfriend before we started dating: it was broken, and she knew I liked working on instruments. I removed the clamps from re-gluing it on the same day as our first date.) The big breakthrough came when I realized that chords written above words were spaced sequentially, but not according to how far apart the changes are in time. (This was much easier to figure out on ukulele than guitar, because there are fewer strings and lots of chords are very easy and accessible.) Figuring out how to listen to the song in my head and think “ahh, I know that it says G-C-D all in a row, but in fact each one of those holds for like two whole measures” was a bit tough, and doing that at the same time as reading the lyrics was even tougher. But slowly it began to make sense: after a week or two, it hit a point where processing the chords at the same time as the words wasn’t really any harder than just reading lyrics.

My process for these is fairly simple. I’ll catch myself humming a song, and think “oh, I wonder if I could play that”, or someone will recommend one. I search for chords online and check to see if it’s basically doable — whether the chords are ones I mostly know, or ones that I could probably pick up with a few days of practice. If so, I copy the lyrics and chords into a file on my computer (so that I can add notes to myself, or adjust the positioning of chords if my perception of the song is different from that of the person that posted the chords). I’ll toss that song into my rotation of things I might play. Most evenings (and sometimes on my lunch breaks) I’ll run through a song or two once or twice; sometimes, I’ll spend hours and hours on one song, or sometimes I’ll just pick a few from my queue and play with them. At the end of the week — typically Sunday morning, but sometimes earlier if I know I’ll be busy, and a few times I’ve been late — I start recording videos of the same song over and over until I get a take I’m pleased with. I post that one to YouTube and post a link to my Facebook with a few paragraphs about why I picked that song, what it means to me, what I was trying to focus on, and an evaluation of what I did well or poorly.

Watching through the playlist of videos, I can see myself get better: this past week’s cover (Don McLean’s American Pie) is much better than the first few. But I’m also struck by how strong some of the early ones are — unsurprisingly, the best ones are usually the ones where I spent the most time practicing. (The best example of this is probably Bob Dylan’s Shelter From the Storm — the recording sounds bad, but I’m actually still pretty pleased with it.) In fact, I think the quality starts to dip sometime a month or two back, as the basic task (“get through the song without embarrassing myself too much”) came to be simple enough that I’d slack off on practicing.

At this point, I’ve been starting to try to focus on specific things. My cover of Solitary Man was my first attempt at playing a whole song fingerstyle instead of just strumming the chords. It’s a bit shaky, the vocals aren’t perfect, there’s more buzz than is typical for me these days, and the rhythm slows down at a few points for no good reason… but it is, in fact, a fingerstyle interpretation of the song. The execution is imperfect, but I pulled it off.

Part of the point of this project has been to counterbalance years of focusing on production over performance, but I still pay a lot of attention to timbre. I’ve ended up with quite a collection of different instruments, and selecting which one I’ll use for a given cover is part of the fun. (At some point soon, I’d actually like to put together a mini-documentary on “how different guitars sound different” — which are bright or mellow, loud or soft, and easier or harder to play in different styles.) Sometimes the concerns are ergonomic rather than sonic: I covered Smog’s Blood Red Bird primarily to practice barre chords; in order to save my forearms (barre chords take *strength* to a degree that other chords don’t), I played it on my classical guitar, because its nylon strings require much less pressure from the fingers.

Most of these covers have been on acoustic instruments, with only two exceptions (Tim Buckley’s Song to the Siren and The White Stripes’ Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground) so far. That’s been deliberate: acoustics are less forgiving of sloppy muting technique, and thus tend to force me to be a bit more careful than I might otherwise be. It’s also a bit easier to practice consistently when I don’t have to worry about plugging in an amp in whatever room I might decide to play in. This is especially important since I bounce back and forth between the room I’ve set up as a studio, my living room, and my back porch.

I’ve also started finding different techniques that work well for me: for example, using a metal fingerpick on my middle finger to strum, rather than holding a pick, sacrifices some variability of sound for a very natural feel and slightly brighter tone, as in my cover of One More Cup of Coffee For The Road.

This project has underlined something that I’ve long known about myself: I learn better when my learning is self-directed. I’ve known what a capo is for as long as I can remember, from seeing my dad use one. (Although he hasn’t taken it seriously in many years, my father is actually a much better guitarist — and singer, for that matter — than I am.) In the course of the #weeklycovers, the first time I used one was on Magnolia Electric Co’s Hammer Down, about which I wrote:

This was also the first time I ever used a capo for something. I didn’t do it to bring it into my range (I can sing it capo-less just fine) but it seemed like as good an opportunity as any to match that up with how-it’s-played. It was neat to discover that transitioning to “playing things higher up the neck because of the capo” was actually very easy for me.

However, that didn’t really cement “why I might use a capo” in my mind. What did that was The Original Caste’s One Tin Soldier:

I also found that I had to capo up a fair amount — that’s on 5, in this video — to keep the range strong. Tuned open, I can hit all the notes, but some of em are notably less strong (and even here, I end up singing fairly high at points).

That was the first time I used a capo to bring a song into my vocal range, rather than just because the chords I’d found said to.

This has been a neat journey so far, both in terms of learning to play guitar and learning to dedicate some time every day to a fun piece of self-improvement. This is an approach — “find easy and fun incremental things that can contribute to a longer-term goal” — that I’ve found works very well for me.

For the rest of the year, I hope to continue to focus on specific improvements. I need to get better at hitting the right pitch with my voice, I need to become more fluid at fingerstyle, and I need to improve my rhythm strumming. But I’m confident that I can do those things, after getting pretty much precisely what I’d hoped to out of the first half of the year of covers.

(I’ve crossposted this piece to Tumblr, if you prefer that for whatever reason.)