I have a couple of games I play periodically during the day; but to me playtime means practice time.
I don’t get to play every day like I would like…or should – life…and work… gets in the way. But, I do enjoy the time when I get it.
It’s a new year, so maybe I should work on that a bit.
Some days practice means just playing the songs I know and getting them down in my fingers and brain. There are a couple of pieces that I really like but the fingering is tricky and takes a lot of repeated playing to get down. I have one piece that I really like – a Finnish folk song – that the fingering isn’t the hard part…the key signature and remembering which notes to fret is the hard part. Every note but the F and the C are flat! Whoa boy!
In college I often heard music majors complain about theory class and wondered what good it would be. Kind of a dumb question for a musician, but… It was that theory class that helped me to finally get a passage down I was having trouble with getting down. Once I realized it was an inverted chord, the rest was easy.
Other times when I practice, I have some video lessons that I watch and play along to and practice a short piece.
Sometimes, I spend a bit of time going through my pile of music and just play a few measures – just a bit of mucking around before I really get into the playing.
But the first thing I have to do before I play a single note is tune up!
Incidentally, I am writing this at what would be my usual play time!