The woodshed, the opportunity

Good for you. I star5ted the lock down with that same mindset - I even set one my basses and a little amp in my home office, so I could pick it up and diddle for a few minutes while I was "working". But that didn't last long.
I wish I'd had still had my "first year desire" when this hit, because this is exactly what we all should have been doing. But I actually went the other way, and played/practiced very little. Every time I forced myself to pick up the bass, I got uninterested after about 15 minutes.

I'm starting to come out of it a little in the last month or so, but this has been pretty wasted time from that perspective. The fact that I worked myself to exhaustion every day in the yard for 4 months didn't help, but I started that project because I was bored.

 

The whole stay home, work-at-home thing has actually cut into my musical pursuits pretty hard, as Mrs. Winslow and I share an office. Even if I were to play through headphones, I'd feel like I was being a disturbance to her while she's on her calls. So any notions I had about practicing more have pretty much gone out the proverbial window.

As it happens, there's also been a lot of work to do on, in, and around Fort Winslow that involves actual wood. And hammers, and nails.nail guns, and heavy/noisy things, and trips to the "home center." So I've been getting a lot done, but it's only musical if I hammer things rhythmically.

 

I've been working from home too. I usually practice an hour before work, and hour at lunch and an hour at the end of the day. No doubt I'm playing the best I've played since I was playing full time in my 20's. I've never had a problem with motivating myself to practice so the plague isn't a problem for me.

 

This is true, and it should be above every doorway and in ever rehearsal room in every music school.

 

I don't really know, but I'm sure it had something to do with all the cancelled gigs. In March I had the fullest gig calendar of my - albeit short - gigging career and it felt like my primary band was finally starting to hit stride - plus I was playing with two other projects on the side. Had 5 gigs set up in a 3 week span! Having all those gigs just vanish was pretty disheartening. My primary band did manage to find three non paying gigs (one was a private event that WE financed) which helped us to stay interested as a band, and I practiced just enough to pull those off. We did resume somewhat regular rehearsals in June, but unless a gig was on the horizon, there wasn't a lot of commitment.

It seems I've transitioned from a "just want to play and learn as much as I can" phase, to just playing to prep for gigs. I'm not particularly proud of it, but that seems to be the reality. Not that I don't have gaps in my technique, but it's been a few years since I've really spent much time on personal development. I pretty much focus on locking down and staying sharp on set list songs now. Used to play a least some (30-60 minutes) pretty much every day. From April to November it was closer to 30-60 minutes per week - if that much.

Essentially no gigs to worry about, and nowhere to go, led me to take on one of my bigger home projects including burning off a couple of weeks of vacation time along the way.

In November, having finished my project, I found that I enjoyed playing again just to play and aside from the dozen new songs my band is working out, I've begun exploring different strings (play strictly flats - put some rounds back on one of my basses) which is leading me to work on a technique that ha completely eluded me so far, so perhaps I'm out of the funk - for now anyway.