Tonight’s practice session began fairly routinely… open the lesson book, run through some warm-up exercises, taking it slow to focus on playing the notes nice and clean and smooth… but then something magical happened.

I zoned out. 

I drifted off to The Zone while playing the melody from 3-Doors Down‘s “Here Without You”; a fucking awesome song that I learned how to play a ways back.  Since I already knew the tune, I wasn’t so concerned with playing it through perfectly, I was more just messing around and trying some different strum patterns, working in a few extra notes here and there to spice it up.  Just messing around.

I first played it the traditional way, as the band recorded it, but then I added a capo and started moving that around a bit to experiment with different sounds and try out which chord shapes would work best.  And even though I wouldn’t consider myself a singer (it’s all guitar for me, baby!) I did try singing a few bars trying to see where my vocal range could match up with the tones coming out.

While all this was going on, I don’t think my eyes ever left the fretboard… except for those moments when I was off in dreamland visualizing myself performing in front of mass crowds.  Eventually I did look up at the clock and, holy shit!, at least 45 minutes had passed by.  If you had asked me how much time I thought had passed, I would’ve guessed about 10-15 minutes… and I would’ve been a half hour short.  the earth circled around me for at least 30 minutes and I was obliviously to it all.

This, my friends, is what I call being in the Zone.

When I finally “came to” and realized how much time had passed, I just sat there with a smug ear-to-ear grin on my face.  I felt awesome!

If you’ve been there before, you know what I’m talking about.  If you’ve yet to experience the Zone yet, here’s how to get there.

Until next time, happy zoning out.