Post by grampalerxst on Feb 7, 2014 7:31:05 GMT -6
At Phil's suggestion I took some time and wrote this up. It was a struggle, not because it's "long", but it was a challenge trying to put the "whole picture" together so that it would make sense. I was partly successful, but partly not. The backstory is that after many decades I've discovered how to "practice" with, for, me, far more effective results, and in the hope that something I'm doing might trigger a seed to sprout for another developing player, I've blurted it all out to the best of my ability.
I don't think any of the ideas are original--some I know aren't, others are adapted in ways they may not have been originally intended, the rest are probably things I've been carrying in my subconscious where some book or person planted a seed that didn't take root until now.
Where it all started was in the realization that I couldn't honestly say I knew how to play the guitar, although I could fool people, including myself. With that as a starting point and more than a decade away from the instrument I decided last month to pick it up again.
When I was a kid I got a basketball and went out in the alley behind our house and learned to bounce it and throw it through the hoop nailed to the back of our garage. I played with friends, watched games between older kids and on TV, and imitated what I saw other players do. I got to be better than most of my friends as the years went on. All the time I spent out there pretending to be Dr. J or John Havlecek became my understanding of what practice was--you just do something long enough and you'll get good at it.
So that's how I approached the guitar, and (abridged version) it didn't work out. I put quite a lot of time and effort into the endeavor, but by constantly trying to bull through things I couldn't navigate I trained myself to stumble and lurch rather than to play. Apparently my hand-eye coordination and "macro" physical control was able to self-adjust and allow me to progress in sports "naturally". But my micro coordination had no such ability. I don't know why it's that way for me. Plenty of outstanding guitar players dive in and learn the guitar the way I learned basketball.
I realized my new chore for 2014 was to completely relearn the instrument on the physical level. What I wanted to do this time was through practice actually acquire skill with the guitar, and I knew I had to do something different than before. I even came up with working definitions:
Skill: the ability required to perform an activity with proficiency.
Practice: an intentional, focused, systematic process to increase skill.
I'll leave out the the details of my thought process, but I determined I had to go back to what I've come to call "first lessons". And not just do so for a week or two as a review and move on, but that I needed to make them part of every day going forward. So I start each practice in what I jokingly call fingergarten. As an example, I mentioned in another thread that I start every practice with 9-12 minutes of the most basic movement of guitar playing there is: simply sounding an open string. I'm unusually challenged rhythmically so I do it on a very slow pulse (40-50 bpm) set by a metronome using increasingly shorter note values (I only go up to eighth note triplets at this stage). After that I do a similar thing for the left hand, doing an equally slow walk through of the BYCU scale for whatever lesson I'm on, usually at the same tempo starting with half notes and working up to eighths with a few minutes at each.
Those specific motions aren't really the point. Staying focused on what I'm doing is. Being "mindful", a Zen practitioner might say. One of my little epiphanies for 2014 is that when I play, I can't be separate from the music. If my mind is not there with the guitar (and the metronome), the noise that I make is not music.
The bigger key is that as practice progresses, when I mess something up I go back to the first lessons, not the practice start drills I mentioned, but I break down what I'm playing into the smallest elements possible and attempt to pinpoint, isolate, and correct the error, reinforce the corrections though correct repetition, before going back to what I was doing. I approach the problem area sort of like I've never picked up a guitar before and explain to myself what I need to do right before, during, and right after a trouble spot as if I was teaching a 5-year-old kid what to do (hence "fingergarten"). I've been surprised what I've learned from dispensing with "I already know how to do that" attitude, and pleasantly surprised with the results over 5 weeks. What I've stopped doing is playing things over and over and over that I'm knowingly screwing up, hoping that after a hundred or a thousand times the mistakes will go away (without any specific attempts to correct specific problems). That's how I got really proficient at making mistakes. I practiced them.
So, as rambling as that is, I suppose that's kind of the essense. What's worked for me is to cultivate enough humility that it doesn't bother me to treat myself like a child when it comes to learning the instrument, and to go back and re-teach my fingers what to do a baby step at a time where I encounter difficulties.
There are a few other points I use to shape my practice. This is already long so I'll just list them. A couple are repeats from above.
One last thought is that all the above just happens to be what works for me. I'm not professing what I believe others should do. I believe we each have our own unique development needs. That's why I didn't list a lot of specifics or any kind of a routine (Phil gave a nice template in the recent "Double-Stop Stomp" thread). I had to be honest with myself, identify my needs (as best I could), and go as far back up the chain of cause/effect as required to fix things. Turns out that for me, in many ways that was back to the very beginning. I suppose there are other long-plateaued players who might need to do the same thing. Others will have the natural adaptation mechanisms in place to continually make corrections for problems on the fly, like I did with basketball. I'm just not one of those and so have to be more deliberate about it.
So if you've read this hopefully some small facet of the approach, philosophical or practical, will help you along the way. It's easy to dismiss my "feelings" of my new practice approach being surprisingly effective as just the flush enthusiasm from working off the rust after a ten-year layoff. I can't dispute that as a possibility. But, if things go as I plan and I'm able to continue posting a recorded snapshot of the BYCU studies I'm working each month, by the end of the year we'll all get to see for ourselves.
I don't think any of the ideas are original--some I know aren't, others are adapted in ways they may not have been originally intended, the rest are probably things I've been carrying in my subconscious where some book or person planted a seed that didn't take root until now.
Where it all started was in the realization that I couldn't honestly say I knew how to play the guitar, although I could fool people, including myself. With that as a starting point and more than a decade away from the instrument I decided last month to pick it up again.
When I was a kid I got a basketball and went out in the alley behind our house and learned to bounce it and throw it through the hoop nailed to the back of our garage. I played with friends, watched games between older kids and on TV, and imitated what I saw other players do. I got to be better than most of my friends as the years went on. All the time I spent out there pretending to be Dr. J or John Havlecek became my understanding of what practice was--you just do something long enough and you'll get good at it.
So that's how I approached the guitar, and (abridged version) it didn't work out. I put quite a lot of time and effort into the endeavor, but by constantly trying to bull through things I couldn't navigate I trained myself to stumble and lurch rather than to play. Apparently my hand-eye coordination and "macro" physical control was able to self-adjust and allow me to progress in sports "naturally". But my micro coordination had no such ability. I don't know why it's that way for me. Plenty of outstanding guitar players dive in and learn the guitar the way I learned basketball.
I realized my new chore for 2014 was to completely relearn the instrument on the physical level. What I wanted to do this time was through practice actually acquire skill with the guitar, and I knew I had to do something different than before. I even came up with working definitions:
Skill: the ability required to perform an activity with proficiency.
Practice: an intentional, focused, systematic process to increase skill.
I'll leave out the the details of my thought process, but I determined I had to go back to what I've come to call "first lessons". And not just do so for a week or two as a review and move on, but that I needed to make them part of every day going forward. So I start each practice in what I jokingly call fingergarten. As an example, I mentioned in another thread that I start every practice with 9-12 minutes of the most basic movement of guitar playing there is: simply sounding an open string. I'm unusually challenged rhythmically so I do it on a very slow pulse (40-50 bpm) set by a metronome using increasingly shorter note values (I only go up to eighth note triplets at this stage). After that I do a similar thing for the left hand, doing an equally slow walk through of the BYCU scale for whatever lesson I'm on, usually at the same tempo starting with half notes and working up to eighths with a few minutes at each.
Those specific motions aren't really the point. Staying focused on what I'm doing is. Being "mindful", a Zen practitioner might say. One of my little epiphanies for 2014 is that when I play, I can't be separate from the music. If my mind is not there with the guitar (and the metronome), the noise that I make is not music.
The bigger key is that as practice progresses, when I mess something up I go back to the first lessons, not the practice start drills I mentioned, but I break down what I'm playing into the smallest elements possible and attempt to pinpoint, isolate, and correct the error, reinforce the corrections though correct repetition, before going back to what I was doing. I approach the problem area sort of like I've never picked up a guitar before and explain to myself what I need to do right before, during, and right after a trouble spot as if I was teaching a 5-year-old kid what to do (hence "fingergarten"). I've been surprised what I've learned from dispensing with "I already know how to do that" attitude, and pleasantly surprised with the results over 5 weeks. What I've stopped doing is playing things over and over and over that I'm knowingly screwing up, hoping that after a hundred or a thousand times the mistakes will go away (without any specific attempts to correct specific problems). That's how I got really proficient at making mistakes. I practiced them.
So, as rambling as that is, I suppose that's kind of the essense. What's worked for me is to cultivate enough humility that it doesn't bother me to treat myself like a child when it comes to learning the instrument, and to go back and re-teach my fingers what to do a baby step at a time where I encounter difficulties.
There are a few other points I use to shape my practice. This is already long so I'll just list them. A couple are repeats from above.
- I cannot separate myself from the music. If my mind wanders out of the room and away from the guitar, whatever noise I'm making cannot be truly musical. Attentive concentration is the key to acquiring skill, and the key to translating that skill into music.
- Be able to state aloud or write down in detail any sequence of movements I'm going to expect my fingers to do, especially if it is something new. "Just do it" is fine for shoes, but not for my playing.
- Be a bricklayer: each movement becomes the basis for the next movement, the basis of my present skill level, and part of the foundation on which I'll build my future skill.
- Don't introduce new elements into my practice routine unless they specifically support my current short term goals. Knowing how to sweep pick the arpeggios of every inversion of every chord known to man will not help me this month with "Blues Rock Tune" or "Spread Along the Neck".
- Enter each phase of each practice with a specific goal (or goals) in mind, something like "figure out why my fourth finger is always late getting down for this E7 chord then determine how to change it's behavior and get it in sync with the others". Find a way to work the problem in isolation, which means turning off the metronome and going as slow as I need to go to detect everything that's happening with both hands.
- Take some time each week just to play for enjoyment, without any of the "constraints" of practice, but mentally segregate it from practice. Also, spend at least twice the time practicing as playing for fun each week.
One last thought is that all the above just happens to be what works for me. I'm not professing what I believe others should do. I believe we each have our own unique development needs. That's why I didn't list a lot of specifics or any kind of a routine (Phil gave a nice template in the recent "Double-Stop Stomp" thread). I had to be honest with myself, identify my needs (as best I could), and go as far back up the chain of cause/effect as required to fix things. Turns out that for me, in many ways that was back to the very beginning. I suppose there are other long-plateaued players who might need to do the same thing. Others will have the natural adaptation mechanisms in place to continually make corrections for problems on the fly, like I did with basketball. I'm just not one of those and so have to be more deliberate about it.
So if you've read this hopefully some small facet of the approach, philosophical or practical, will help you along the way. It's easy to dismiss my "feelings" of my new practice approach being surprisingly effective as just the flush enthusiasm from working off the rust after a ten-year layoff. I can't dispute that as a possibility. But, if things go as I plan and I'm able to continue posting a recorded snapshot of the BYCU studies I'm working each month, by the end of the year we'll all get to see for ourselves.
