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This afternoon, I spent a couple of hours recording and re-recording myself playing a piece I?m trying to master.* It?s my own guitar arrangement of Were You There. I took the chords from Ritual Song and figured out how to play the melody off the chords. My guitar guru, Vincent, helped me a bit with the arrangement.

Last year, Vincent recommended that I record myself. I was reminded today that this was good advice. Here are two reasons why.

• Playing back the recording lets you hear how you really sound. You hear every mistake, every difference between how you think you sound and how you really sound.
• The exercise of recording yourself forces you to run through the piece many times. I must have done 30 takes of the song to get 2 versions worth keeping. If you?re trying to master something, practicing it 30 times in a row isn?t a bad exercise.

There may be some lessons here for other things besides music. One is figuring out a way to view your work from someone else?s perspective. Another is the discipline of going through something over and over and over (e.g. 30 times in one afternoon).

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* In case you?re curious, I use RiffWorks software to record myself on my computer. It?s easy to use, and it creates WAV files, which iTunes can convert into MP3.

I?m also working on ?O Sacred Head Surrounded.? That one is more difficult than ?Were You There.? I?m still working on my goal of uploading a decent rendition of that one by Good Friday.

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