I seem to often read on the session folk saying that they fit music into their lives by playing five minutes a day. They seem to value frequency above length of time spent. I'm never clear whether they are saying they would only do 5 minutes even if they had a spare hour, or that 5 minutes a day keeps the momentum, or that they actually believe you can learn something, improve in 5 minutes.
I'm not clear, either, whether that's an actual or rhetorical 5 minutes.
I've given it a go a couple of times. My main problem is that I can't stop after 5 minutes and have gone on for 20 or 30 instead, mostly because time flies, but also because I always just want to go through that tune one more time, or I think of another tune I really want to play, and another one...
Five minutes are enough to realise that I can still find my fingers for A, that the bag feels huge with A and needs lots of air, that I only can play parts of Horsburgh by heart, that those parts aren't necessarily the same on A as they are on D, that Horsburgh sounds better on A.
I'm also wondering whether hanging on to dots because it's a long tune, or a fast tune is holding me back from getting tunes by heart: Braemar, Troy, Shetland Fiddler all come to mind here.
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