Music Theory

While I was listening to some of my old vinyl, I stumbled across a fairly depressing realization.  I think that I'm further back with my music theory than I've been giving myself credit for.  I feel like I spend a lot of time practicing scales, but I don't spend nearly enough time improvising, and I spend almost no time at all playing with other people (or other live music).  Some of the stuff that people do with blues/jazz guitar is pretty far above what seems possible for me.  There are a lot of areas to explore and I feel like I don't know where to start.  I know some basic music theory concepts, but just listening to what can be done makes me wonder what it's going to take to get there.  A lot of practice?  Being around other people that practice a lot?  Maybe just listening to more music can help.

Vinyl Speculation

I started listening to some of my old vinyl again recently.  I'd just like to note right away that everything that I'm going to say is pretty much guessing and borderline hearsay.  The first time I listened to vinyl, I knew that it sounded good in it's own way, but I couldn't exactly say why or that it was any better than digital music.  It's possible my hearing has gotten better since I've last listened to vinyl, because I can tell there is a change when switching between mediums.  I know that digital music is available in a variety of different qualities, but that seems to improve in a different direction.  With a physical copy of music there are a lot of imperfections that just aren't there with digital copies, but this is easily ignored.  This lack of imperfections gives a sort of inflated quality improvement.  I want to say that the separation between instruments is more obvious with vinyl and this accounts for most of the quality difference that is hard if possible at all to actually define.  Once again, this is just something fun to think about.

Awkwardness

I haven't been doing enough brainstorming lately.  Instead of actually trying to do that and get some sort of outline, narrative, and general flow going, I've mostly just been doing random practice exercises.  I must feel out of shape or something.  I guess I would call this random practice exercise.  My main thoughts are that if I just do enough practice, I'll start to form actual idea around this mass of stuff that I start to accumulate.  So far, I think I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit.  I think that you need a lot of material to start to think about things like that.  When you only have a small amount you start to try to use everything.  I need to have a throw-away pile somewhere.  All I can really do is keep practicing.  Maybe, I should brainstorm more ways to practice.