I didn't touch a guitar for almost three months.
Actually it might have been more than three months. For the whole time we've been in Berlin they just sat there forlornly in the corner of the room.
I finally took my acoustic guitar out a few days ago and had a tinker about on it. After a few minutes I was feeling totally uninspired. My fingers and brain were falling back into the same old habits and patterns. Boring. This is why my guitar break occurred in the first place — and more often than not why it's happened in the past — I get bored of the same old sounds.
Nevertheless I feel the sense that I should be working on my guitar playing. I saw a solution: get back into practicing Oxbow guitar parts that have unusual guitar tunings. During COVID lockdown, when I was still living in Prague, I discovered a helpful facebook post where guitarist Niko Wenner helpfully listed all the Oxbow guitar tunings he uses. It's quite a list. Most of their songs are in alternate tunings. I figured out (more or less) quite a few of the parts back then.
Time to get back on it. I picked the: C G C D# G C tuning Niko uses on the following tracks:
The Snake &..., SbarX, Stallkicker, Sorry, Shine (Glimmer) (An Evil Heat)
Time, Gentlemen, Time, A Winner Every Time (The Narcotic Story)
I'd already worked out parts of Time, Gentlemen, Time—it helps that there's a video of the band performing it on YouTube. I went over that a bit and then decided to tackle A Winner Every Time. Several hours later I've got a rudimentary version I can play. The timing (as with many Oxbow tracks) is one of the harder features. This isn't like playing Pantera. It's not physically gruelling; it's unusual, it's avant-garde, it's mighty cool. It's fun to play. Maybe I'll get inspired to write something myself in this tuning. Whether I'm able to do that without sounding like I'm copying Niko remains to be seen.