Well, we’ve been a month on this lovely WordPress-hosted site now, seven months-ish of the blog and a good time is being had by all – including yourselves I hope dear readers!

So I think it’s time add to add in a new little feature that may interest you, and possibly help the time-stretched (most of us!).

From today I’m also going to post up audio files/podcasts of my postings. Woop! Woop!

The aim of this is to offer another avenue for you to explore the blog – and now you can listen to me witter on with my guitar-inflected pearls of wisdom when you’re on the tram or driving to work (but not cycling to work, because that’s naughty to have headphones in whilst doing that isn’t it?).

Initially these will be some of my back catalogue of posts, so this may interest some of you newer readers and followers. But then again it may also interest some of you who have read for a while and want to revisit and recap on some of my earlier musings. I’m thinking there may be some audio-only content coming up in the near future too. If you’ve any thoughts on that please let me know.

I’ll embed these into coming posts, but I’ll also created a dedicated page for these to live on permanently so you can access them super easily whenever you want. Keep your eyes peeled for that coming up shortly.

Anyway, here’s the first one for you: How do you practice when you can’t practice?

You can also stream this and download directly from SoundCloud:  http://soundcloud.com/nicole-rogers/how-do-you-practice-when-you

Ooh and before I forget I’m also working on some video content for the near future. Oooh…… [tanglible anticipation ensues].

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On a completely different note now, and harking back to one of my pet topics for the moment – ensemble playing…

Reading Carlos Bonell’s blog again recently he talks about the benefits of ensemble playing. One quote stood out in particular for me and I just wanted to share that with you:

To achieve great things in playing music with others requires more than loads of practise and rehearsing together: it needs a meeting of minds and such familiarity that one player can anticipate another’s next move intuitively. For the musicians who enjoy this feeling it is a wonderful experience. To reach it is the wish of all who participate, with the pleasure of working towards it almost as intense as its realisation.

This is so true, and it is extremely difficult to surpass the feeling of playing music with others. There’s a little magical feeling that can’t help but leave a big cheesy grin on your face when you know you’ve hit “the groove”, you’re all in the zone together. Ooh. Magical… Brrr. If you get the chance to give it a whirl, grab it with both hands!

You can read all of Carlos’ great insights here: http://queenguitarrhapsodies.com/blog/?p=1313