Almost, not quite

I almost threw my sticks tonight.  (That would have been a first.)  Not like I was afraid of getting a two-stroke penalty or general public approbation like those two golfers who threw their clubs in, oh, call them fits of pique.  

It was just after making the same mistake yet again.  I've looped, drilled, slowed down and done it again, and it still isn't tying-my-shoes second nature, so I have to remember each step of certain transitions.  I'm playing a simple ride-LFhat for 16 bars, and on the last And of the last bar, I have to remember not to lift the left foot the way I did on autopilot the previous 15 3/4 bars.  That's because in the next section I'm shifting to a beat that includes RHhat, and it's not supposed to sound sloshy.   It's hold down the left foot, crash with the right hand, and start 16 bars of shave-and-a-haircut.  You know, that part I was working on and wrote about ten days ago.

There are several of those kind of "forget what you were doing and start something else" moments during the four-minute song, and I do have some of them under control, even most of them.  But there are still moments when I'm getting to the end of a 16-bar section, on autopilot, and I'm trying to remember something I've practiced and practiced.  You'd think it would have sunk in by now.

When the mistake happened this time, I didn't keep going.  The backing track did, but I stopped.  When it stopped, I set up another 8-bar loop with that transition and played it again and again until getting it right several times in a row.  That's not the first time I've practiced it that way.  Maybe next time I'll remember it better.