I'll do a solo here
April 27th, 2026
Glass boardroom, catering served, a lot of Montblanc pens. The opposite of my old dark, grungy, smelly, and awesome band rehearsal room, fifteen years back, filled with guitar amps and setlist notes and private jokes on the wall.
But what happened next felt strangely familiar: senior partners preparing a pitch. One would mention a key message, loosely, the way a musician might hum a motif before committing to it. Another would run through a segment almost fully, then wave their hand at the next part — the equivalent of "I'll do a solo here." Nobody seemed worried. Nobody ran it from the top. What looked like scattered annotations on a music sheet the night before was, the next day, a full functioning band that appeared to have been rehearsing for months.
It was the ease that comes with mastery. The scales so deeply internalised that improvisation stops being a risk and becomes just another way of playing something you already know. I've felt that before, both with music and design. Comfortable enough with the material to jazz through a presentation, fill a silence, find the phrase when it isn't written down.
But there are rooms where I feel something else. A specific silence that only I can hear — mid-sentence, when the word I need isn't where I left it. I become aware of the pause, then aware that I'm aware of it. From the outside it probably reads as composure. From the inside it feels like an eternity. It only happens outside my instrument, where I'm still learning the scales.
Charlie Parker said it better than I can: "Master your instrument, master the music, and then forget all that and just play."