Adam Rafferty: This is how I practice guitar

Thanks to my friend Anton Emery, I just read fingerstyle guitarist Adam Rafferty's nice blog post about how he practices guitar, in which he says:

When I practice, I do it for the love of doing it.  I play my scales every day with attention to “form”, relaxation, groove and tone.  I run my repertoire for the delicacy and delight of playing with a deep satisfying rhythmic pocket and fingers that perfectly “touch” the strings.

I plod along, day by day – and will do so for my whole life.  Day in, day out.  That’s what I do.  I practice for the love of practicing itself – with no result in mind.  This is how I practice guitar.

I have to agree. For me, the learning and experience is the key. Some days I really enjoy solving problems and developing my understanding, and some days I can just sit there for a half hour and just work on smoothing out one small aspect of technique. I find it more satisfying to accomplish one substantial thing than to try to chip away at a whole bunch of things.

Playing on the beat

I've been working recently on learning to play 'drums' on a midi keyboard, for a recording project. I haven't seriously played a keyboard instrument since I was 8, so I have no real keyboard technique, and seeing my notes appear on screen piano-roll-style made it obvious that I was playing ahead of the beat all the time. This could easily be fixed after the fact, but I knew I'd be happier if I could get it right from the beginning.

As a quick aside, getting it right doesn't mean every note has to be squarely on the beat. That goes for classical guitar too, as my teacher frequently reminds me.

I spent a bunch of time trying to play on the beat, and was still always ahead of it, being both incompetent and anxious that I was going to get it wrong yet again. So then I started trying to deliberately play after the metronome click, hoping that my tendency to anticipate the beat would even things out. At first, it made me feel way more anxious (I'm going to be late!) but the recording and 'piano roll' don't lie; almost right away, I was right on.

Now, I'm not going to say the problem is 100% solved, but after spending more time with it, the anxiety started going away with the comfort of knowing that I was actually playing in time. The tempo felt slower, and I felt less like I needed to hurry to get the next note. Instead of feeling like I'm playing late, it's starting to feel like I was just playing.

This would be a good way for anyone to work on a tendency to play off the beat. Record yourself playing with a metronome and listen carefully to the result. If you find that you're playing early, try waiting for the click before playing next time. If you play late, try anticipating the click.

If you're right on all the time, try playing ahead of or behind the beat intentionally for effect. This kind of control of the rhythm is the next step.

More thoughts on Effortless Mastery

Life has been busy recently, unfortunately full of real-world work, and not a whole lot of time for music. As I often do in these times, I'm still practicing guitar regularly but focusing on one just thing. This time, it is effortlessness.

It took me a really long time to figure out that the way to play effortlessly is not to struggle with material until it becomes easy and effortless. To date, that method has never worked for me.

The message of Kenny Werner's excellent "Effortless Mastery" book basically boils down to this:

• To play effortlessly, you have to play effortlessly now.
• You play effortlessly now by playing only what you can play effortlessly now.
• To play new things effortlessly, you have to work on them as slowly and/or gradually as necessary to keep the effortless feeling. Develop the comfort zone gradually. 
• Play the material fast sometimes, too, but keep the effortless feeling and completely ignore mistakes. You can work them out in the slow practice; the fast practice is to get used to the feeling of playing fast. 

So what is effortlessness? 

I used to think it was a physical feeling, but that's just part of it. Keeping a quiet mind is just as important. With the mind quiet and even detached from the physical side of playing, it becomes much easier to listen to what you're doing and develop a listening-based method of playing rather than a physical activity-based method of playing.

It's important to learn the feeling of effortlessness as early on as you can, whether you're working on difficult music, scales, basic finger mechanics, or even just sitting silently with the guitar.

Making changes

After giving a house concert in Seattle a few weeks ago (big thanks to Rich for hosting!), once of the audience members said to me, "that Bach suite must have taken forever to learn."

I've written about my experience learning this suite (BWV 1009) in the past and I'd sum it up by saying that I've tried every memory and visualization trick in the book on it and I've never had so much trouble with memorization with a piece. It didn't go badly in performance, but I needed the music in front of me to feel confident that I could stay on track.

So I responded, "I feel like I'll still be learning it when I'm an old man. If I could start over again with it and do one thing differently, I would study it a lot more before trying to play it."

Sometimes it's tempting to get into practice mode before music is properly studied and learned. In this case, the piece superficially appears 'easy'; it's mostly one note at a time, fairly easy to read, somewhat (deceptively) formulaic, and because of my listening history, it's very familiar.

But I was tricked by that sense of familiarity into believing I had studied it enough. I clearly skipped head, because as time went on, I kept finding areas where I wanted to change my fingerings to get things across better.

That's sort of where the problems started showing up. Better fingerings are, well, better, but what happens when you change fingerings? If you've been practicing the old way for a while, you've now practiced two ways of doing it. How do you make sure you're going to do it the right way when it comes time to perform?

Thorough study at the beginning of the learning process, finding the best solutions and committing to them early on, seems like the best way to head this problem off at the pass.

There will be cases where you need to change a fingering, but you need an effective brainwashing strategy (please share!) or it may be better to make note of your new way but then leave it alone until you've had a chance to put the piece down for a while and look at afresh.

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PS: Speaking of making changes, my wife Angeline and I are moving to Tulsa over the next month or so. She leaves in mid-April, after which my life will get quite boring. So I'm planning to make a series of videos between then and the end of April or so, in which I work on a short piece for a day and then film&post it. My main focus will be on musicality, but I have a few other goals:

1) Learn to pull together pieces and interpretations more quickly
2) Produce a demo CD to send to senior centers and other gig venues
3) Watch my movements, facial expressions, etc, and learn what I can from them
4) Get more comfortable with recording.

I've posted the first video already, mainly as a technology test. I hope to achieve better quality video in the future, but that may not happen until I can afford a real video camera. I'm pleased with the quality of the audio, though. The description on the youtube page describes my setup.

My hope is that I'll enjoy this project, learn a lot from it, and want to keep it up in the long run.

Trust yourself

Peter Mitchell commented on my "You have to really listen" post:

I think this is related to the discussion around "multitasking". I think the idea that you can passively listen, which implies focusing on other things, and still fully experience the music is definitely not the case. Multitasking is somewhat of a myth when you look at how our brains actually function. Something always has to take priority when it comes to assigning attention. So in this case, it needs to be the music. Otherwise, I think you are missing out on a lot that you don't even realize. 

I agree, and I think that what I encountered in my previous post was that sometimes putting a lot of effort into 'focusing' can be a distraction from what you're actually doing.

You have to listen to what you're playing, and you have to know how to actually play it, but my experience has been that conscious control, especially in performance, can lead to the opposite effect.

In other words, I play my best when I can just let go and trust myself. It's not always an easy thing to do; at least not yet.

How do you learn to trust yourself?

Prepare thoroughly

Learn the music correctly from the beginning. Understand it before you play it. Practice it regularly and efficiently. Don't practice mistakes; focus on solutions before repetitions.

Don't get too far ahead of yourself

Plan to perform mostly music that is within your reach. It's good to push yourself a bit so you can grow, but if your whole program consists of music you can only occasionally perform well, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

Play with your eyes closed

Playing with your eyes closed will tell you how well you really know a piece, but if you've been playing for a while and you haven't tried it before, you might find that you can do it better than you expected. I think it helps cultivate a better physical understanding of the instrument as well as an aural experience of the music.

Take a leap of faith

Sometimes, in spite of your best efforts, you may end up in a situation where performance day is nearly upon you and things haven't all come together the way you wanted. At that point, the best thing you can do for yourself is decide to just have fun and do your best.

That's harder than it sounds, but it is absolutely possible. You have to make the choice and commit to it. You have to make that same choice at some point even when you're well-prepared, because performing in front of people is a different skill than preparing in private, and it's a different skill than practicing performing or performing for a recording.

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PS: My recent bunch of gigs were really fun! I had a duo gig with Jason on Thursday, solo recital Saturday afternoon, fundraiser solo/duo recital with my wife Angeline Saturday evening, and then a house concert in Seattle on Tuesday night. At the last one, I got to play in front of a roomful of guitarists, which is usually the hardest thing but it felt great.

It's a real privilege to play for an audience that understands the music and the effort that went into preparing it!

Wooten's metronome games

Philip Hii's been writing about rhythm a lot on his blog lately, and so I feel like it's a good time to work on my rhythm (it's always a good time to work on rhythm). I think I have pretty good rhythm, but I would rather leave no room for doubt about it.

I recently read Victor Wooten's excellent book "The Music Lesson" (thanks to Doug Young for the recommendation!) in which he discusses 10 fundamental aspects of musicianship in ways that I think are not often dealt with. He's a jazz bassist, of course, and the book is written somewhat from that perspective, but pretty much all of it applies in one way or another to any other kind of music and instrument. I'll write up a review of it at some point, but for now...

Victor Wooten offers some interesting exercises for working on rhythm in "The Music Lesson," and there's a nice video on Youtube where he demonstrates some of them.

Watch this:

Applying this to classical guitar

I've taken La Catedral: Allegro Solemne and prepared the following example. The accent marks show where the metronome should click in relation to the music. The first example is how I typically feel the piece; the next two are a bit harder and then the rest are even harder.

For each one, start by counting out loud so the click lines up with the right beat. Victor demonstrates in the video. For a lot of us that will be a great exercise in and of itself.

Once you get that going, start playing the example on the "one" and work on it until you are comfortable with the beat placement. Then, if you know the rest of the piece, continue on and see how far you can keep time with the metronome on that beat. Or, apply it to a piece that you do know.

If you can make it through the whole thing without losing the beat, I salute you!

The rest of us should persist with it until we can.

I can't yet get all the way through the piece this way, but after an hour of working this way, I found that I was playing with a rhythmic clarity that I hadn't realized I was lacking before. But I also found that I could play way faster than usual without any tension, and barely made any mistakes. In fact, I felt like the music was playing itself!

Why? As Victor says, when you work on this exercise, you're no long just playing along with the metronome. The rhythm has to come from within you. It's one thing to feel like you're playing in time, and another to know with absolute confidence that you are. The metronome will tell you.

I would be surprised if anyone who tries and sticks with these exercises doesn't have a similar result. It just makes sense to me... It IS a mentally taxing exercise, but it's aimed directly at improving the most fundamental of musical skills.

You might not like hearing this, but the more difficult and frustrating these exercises are for you, the more likely it is you really need them. The upside is, you will be really glad you did!

Also, feel free to start with simpler music, I just chose what I happened to be working on this morning.

Good luck!

Always have a positive musical intent

Philip Hii has been putting up a series of posts about speed and fluidity on his "Art of Virtuosity" blog recently. They're all great, so go check them out (when you're done reading this post!).

There's a section in his "Rebound" post that I wanted to look at:

If you find that you’re not rebounding quickly or that you’re hampered by a lack of speed in your plucking, you might want to check if lack of fluidity could be the culprit.

Make sure that as you play, you do not stop the finger at any point, especially when you have to rebound ie. change direction to bring it back to playing position again.

If you are, try moving the fingers upward after you pluck and rebound in a circular trajectory as described above. You might be surprised by the results.
Fluidity is at the heart of all efficient movement and is absolutely crucial for speed and power.

 -Philip Hii

I think that a lot of times teachers try to convey to students that they shouldn't pluck the strings upwards away from the top of the guitar, which is something that a lot of people instinctively do for fear or getting "stuck" on the next string. "Don't pluck upwards" can eventually get thought of as "there shouldn't be any upward motion."

But somehow you have to clear the string on the way back to playing position, and I think that no matter how you conceptualize it, there will need to be some upward motion. Following Philip's advice will help you understand the whole motion you're working on rather than leaving some of it to chance.

Bicycling exercise

What Philip talks about reminds me of something I read in Pepe Romero's "Guitar Style and Technique" book. Sadly, it is long out of print and I have only been able to borrow it, so I will just paraphrase; Pepe recommends, as an exercise, moving your right hand fingers in circles as through you're pedaling a tiny bicycle.

I have seen it said that this motion should be "avoided at all costs," presumably because if you pluck the string upward, you will get a thin and weak tone... but if you already know how to make a good sounding stroke, it shouldn't be a problem to coordinate the motion so that the upwards portion doesn't begin too soon.

Which brings me too...

Always have a positive musical intent

It's important to work on technique by itself but it always helps to have a musical intent when you do it. I have noticed at times that I can play, for example, scale passages faster in a piece than I could when practicing scales on their own. The perception of difficulty often makes things harder than they really are because when we focus on what we don't want to happen. If you focus instead on what you do want, you'll probably get it quicker.

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PS: I have several upcoming gigs in the Seattle area, although the only gig that's really "public" is at the Burlington, WA public library from 2-3pm. But for those of you attending the recital-type performances, here's what I'm playing:

• Rodrigo: En Los Trigales
• Turina: Fandanguillo
• Villa-Lobos: Prelude 3
• Barrios: Julia Florida, La Catedral
• Bach: Cello Suite BWV 1009
• Llobet: Plany

At at least two of these performances, there will be a piano present, so with my wife Angeline I'll also be playing: 

• Vivaldi: Trio Sonata rv82
• Rodrigo: Españoleta (from Fantasia Para Una Gentilhombre)

Louis Drouët: On the Method of Finishing a Piece

Some food for thought today culled from Louis Drouët's 1830 method for playing the flute. I left the pre-Victorian ESL wording alone, because I find it amusing, but the advice is good:

 On the Method of Finishing a Piece

"The word finish, as employed here, means to bring to perfection. Thus to finish a piece is to labour at it, until it is executed with much purity in the style, as well as neatness in the execution.

"To finish a piece, the question is not to play it to the end, to begin it again afresh and then tune and to continue thus for several days in succession, hoping to bring it to perfection by an execution of this kind. By such a mode of proceeding men become blinded to the piece which they study; they conclude by playing with coldness, and by executing the passages with rapidity, but without neatness; they become habitual to the defects of execution, which occur in the difficult passages, so much so, that they are unfelt by the performer though they strike the ears of his audience in the most glaring manner.

"The following is the shortest method to learn well and speedily, a piece of music that is to be performed in public.  

"It is necessary in the first place to play it once or twice successively, to have a true conception of its general effects. Of the degree of movement which is best adapted to aid it, and in a word that which tends most to identify it with the composer. After this first operation, should be recommenced slowly, a pause should be made at every period, every phrase, and even at every bar; all the details should be laboured with the greatest ease till the performer has acquired the tact of giving the composition every degree of elegance, grace, and dignity; and to display the brilliant passages with the most striking neatness, energy, and splendour. Afterwards from time to time the piece should be performed as if it were executed before the public."

- Louis Drouët, London 1830

Measuring progress

Tracking progress is a popular topic on guitar blogs I read. With all the day-to-day ups and downs, the best advice is to measure progress over the long term. Set some goals and work on them.

Keep revisiting something easy

Something you can do that is really fun and rewarding is to revisit your easiest repertoire. It's tempting, and OK, to leave the stuff behind as you progress. It'd be great to fully master every little bit of music before you move on, but there are so many facets of even the simplest music that you'd probably get overloaded or bored if you tried to do it all at once.

But hold on to that music. Pick something easy (preferably something you learned early on) pull out the music and play it a few times every 6 months or so. Even better, record it every six months and listen to your earlier recordings after you record it again. Compare them, see what has improved and what hasn't.

Notice how your phrasing has changed, notice how you start to make choices about things that you never even noticed before.  If you recorded it, notice how your tone and timing improve.

Use it as a pick-me-up

Sometimes when I'm having rough day, I like to pull out something really familiar, like some simple Sor studies, and play them for a while. It helps me let go of my frustration and remind me of how good I'm able to sound. Then when I go back to my current music, I feel refreshed. It's a way of recalibrating.


That reminds me of something jazz bassist Sean Malone once said to me (or maybe I read it in an interview? I forget) to always start off practicing with something really easy that you can nail every time. It will set the tone for the rest of your practice.

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PS: I've rereleased another old recording of mine, November. It's an ambient electric guitar looping album I recorded about 10 years ago. If any of those words sound interesting to you, give it a listen :)

How to practice things that need a lot of repetition

Some things you practice may require a lot of repetition to train your muscle memory. It's tempting to just keep repeating an exercise thinking you're going to build up strength, but little errors will compound and turn your playing to mush.

Here's an effective way to get things done:

1. Get a clear idea of what you're trying to do before you start. If you don't know what it should sound like, ask your teacher to demonstrate or find a recording of a piece which uses that technique.
2. Set your metronome to a speed where you can do the exercise as closely to that ideal as possible. When in doubt, err on the slow side. 
3. Play the exercise a few times. Do it for maybe 10-15 seconds and stop. It's important, at this point, not to worry about how it sounds.
4. Take a break for a 10-15 seconds and relax. Recall that clear idea of what the exercise your playing should sound like. 
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 a few times, for about five or ten minutes.
6. Take a longer break. 2-3 minutes. Put the guitar down, stand up, think about something else for a bit. 
7. Recall that ideal again. Repeat steps 3-6 until you run out of time or are ready to move on.

In your next practice session, begin again at step one. The trick is to do it as much as possible in the time you have, but take little breaks so you stay focused and don't get tired. The breaks also give things a chance to sink in.

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PS: I was recently contacted by Jason Wehr, another guitarist in town who saw my craigslist ad and liked my recordings. He sent me a link to his youtube channel and I liked his playing, so now we are working on duets together. Our first gig is December 8th at the Anacortes Museum, wish us luck!

How to divide up practice time

Dividing up practice time

Teachers usually recommend dividing up your practice time between technique, studies, and repertoire. Since there are a variety of techniques musicians master, so if you have only half hour to devote to technique, how should you divide that up?

Whether you have half an hour or three hours for your technique practice, I think you should pick the highest priority thing and just focus on that until you master it.

Move on when it is obvious you are ready to move on.

I am feeling the pressure of upcoming performances, but I am still spending most of my practice time on one scale, over and over again, for hours.

What about everything else?

What about arpeggios, tremolo, slurs, and all the other elements of technique? Aren't I ignoring those?

You could look at it that way, but there are and will probably always be aspects of my technique I'm not happy with. Right now, my playing will benefit the most from mastering my scales.

I would rather make a big improvement in one area of playing rather than making incremental improvements in several.

Boring?

This might seem really boring, but the truth is, two hours of scales a day was too boring for me when I was trying to concentrate on them as hard as I can.

Now I just do them while I read blogs/facebook/twitter/whatever.

When I'm ready to move on to music, I put the laptop away, get out my music, and get to work with a fresh mind. I'm tired mentally or physically from the scales.

In fact, I'll hardly feel like I've done them. That's pretty much the point. When you're playing music, you don't want to think, "here's that hard scale." You want to just do it. That is why I practice this way. In the past, I would have thought this was an awful idea, but as far as I'm concerned, the progress speaks for itself.

I'm not saying that I never listen to what I'm doing to check my progress. I'm always listening to it.

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PS: And now for something completely different. I recently completed an ambient/electronic/space music album under the name Glissant. Check it out!

What is efficient?

"When working on the exercises, the guitarist must keep in mind the fact that mechanical repetition is worthless. Every time an exercise is repeated one must consciously correct and/or improve upon the previous playing."

- Ricardo Iznaola, Kitharalogus

"Practicing without thinking about what we’re doing prepares us for real world performance conditions, where we often have to work on automatic pilot mode, especially at the technical level.

I thought I was the only one doing this until a guitarist (and a famous one too, who will remain anonymous) came to visit Corpus Christi. When I went to the hotel to pick him up for the concert, I was surprised to hear, behind the door, intense practicing with the TV at full blast."

- Philip Hii, Art of Virtuosity for Guitar book

Both of these seemingly opposite schools of thought have their adamant supporters, and both have produced stellar musicians. How can that happen?

People are all different and some learn differently, but let's face it, not much about playing any instrument is particularly natural. Sure, some people take to it easier than others and we can use principles of nature to guide our efforts, but when it comes right down to it, everything we do is a learned adaptation to the requirements of the instrument. It will take time to develop.

Some will argue that 'mindless repetition' may not be taking the quickest path, and you are also perhaps running the risk of developing bad habits. But by letting your muscles figure things out on their own and leaving your mind out of it, you are cultivating the ability to play instinctively rather than calculatedly.

Iznaola's recommendation, on the other hand, can easily lead to end-gaining, which is often difficult to see until you're already mired in it. That doesn't mean the approach doesn't work, but I know that I tend to get obsessive about things and am prone to end-gaining, and I think that's why I have had mixed success with it.

Given the examples of success, I conclude that both approaches are valid and have their place, but perhaps aren't equally suited to everyone.

Efficiency IS Important

I'm not advocating wasting your time, and there are clearly times when efficiency is key. For example, the faster and more completely you understand a piece of music, the quicker and easier it should be to learn correctly. Having a secure and well-rounded technique will allow you to focus on the musical aspects of it without getting distracted by the technical side. That is efficient.

All the individual elements of your technique should be as efficient as possible, too. No wasted motion, no stumbling, and no delay as you prepare. While a thorough understanding of the ins and outs of technique is a great start, it offers little advantage until you put in the time imprinting the motions into your muscle memory so they become absolutely instinctive.

How long does it really take?

When I was working as a software engineer, the only times I could get a two-hour task done in two hours was when I had no interruptions. A ten minute interruption didn't make that task take two hours and ten minutes, it made it more like three hours, because of the distraction, the context-switching, and getting back into the groove.

So if a technique on the guitar is going to take 10 ideal-world hours to learn, the more time you can focus on it at a time, the sooner you'll get there. Every interruption will incur some penalty, so maybe doing it an hour a day will make it take 11-12 days, but doing it 10 minutes a day will probably take 70-80 days.

That is, if you can stay motivated and interested enough in working on that same thing 10 minutes a day for 70-80 days. If you're like most people, you'll probably get bored with it, or decide it's good enough for now, and move on to something else before you've really got it nailed down.

Mindless Repetition

One of the things I believe in is practicing in a state of no-mind. You practice without thinking too much about what you’re doing.

- Philip Hii, Art of Virtuosity for Guitar book

There's no real shortcut to developing technique. The closest thing to a shortcut is to have a clear sound-picture in your head of what you are trying to achieve, to have a sense of the right way, and guidance from a teacher.

Then you need to set your metronome for a speed where you are able to play the exercise/technique comfortably, no matter how slowly that is. Set a timer (I use http://e.ggtimer.com/) for 20-30 minutes, or an hour if you can, or even two, and just have at it. Work on one thing at a time and build the muscle memory until you get to the point where your hands just do it for you. You will know recognize that feels like when it happens. And if it doesn't sound right yet, keep at it.

exploring a piece

I'm hanging out in Montana right now, visiting Glacier NP and hanging out with my parents. I brought my guitar, but I've got a lot of projects in the works, so throwing in all the hiking and stuff is limiting my guitar time. So, I decided to pick a piece (Brouwer's Ojos Brujos) that's not long or hard but has some challenges, and explore it. I've played through each voice separately, tried a variety different fingerings for each part of it, ways to play the repeated sections differently, thought about the transitions between sections, etc. As a result, I've gotten most of it memorized without giving any thought to memorizing it, and I've also come up with some unexpected fingerings that help smooth out things I had trouble with and make the melodies sing nicely, too.

I've enjoyed this approach, just getting to know the piece inside and out before committing it to memory. I suppose that if I needed to work up a piece on a short deadline, this approach may not be the best, but I've been able to learn a lot from it.

Things that bear repeating...

I just read a nice blog post from Bob Wooldridge about a concert and workshop given by Jorge Caballero at the GFA convention. There was a nice quote in it:

The workshop started out with Jorge simply asking if anyone had any technical problems that they would like to discuss. But I believe that Jorge was engaging in a somewhat Socratic attempt to shake up our thinking. Several things were suggested as technical problems. Tension, scale velocity, tone, etc.. but Jorge's answer was that these were not really technical but musical. In other words, almost all technical problems are fundamentally musical in nature!

In fact, my teacher Kevin Gallagher said pretty much the same thing to me in my lesson today. I really believe it, and for me it's one of those things that I was starting to grasp and then suddenly it seems like the whole world is shouting it at me.

I can give a really concrete example for it. For a while I've felt like I just wasn't getting out of my guitar what I knew it was capable, in terms of volume and tone. For a while I thought it was because I was trying a different nailshape and wasn't used to it yet, or hadn't gotten it quite right yet. Kevin pointed out to me in a lesson that I was missing some notes in faster passages, or at times they were there but not consistent with the surrounding notes. I started paying a lot more attention to the consistency of volume and tone, not so that everything was even really but so that it fit in better with the "trajectory" of the line. So if I meant to play a line at a given volume level, that all the notes fit in, or if I was making a decrescendo, that each note had the right volume and tone for its place in the line.

Of course it helped right away, but the best thing about this was that it made me pay a lot more attention to the sound I was producing. It made me take the time to listen to things like chords and arpeggios. Did each note in the chord have the right "weight" behind it? Did the voices within the chords sound connected to the adjacent chords, as with the single-note lines mentioned before? Without these details in place, the sound gets unfocused and deteriorates.

Now, this is the kind of thing that if I were to try to think about every detail while I was playing a piece, I wouldn't be able to play it. But in practice, I could take it a bit at a time and start building the correct habit. Obviously, there was technique involved in solving these problems, but the reality is that technique wouldn't make sense without the musical context and that educating the ear and letting the rest follow is often a much easier way to accomplish thing than to focus closely on the mechanical aspect and risk getting distracted from the result.

The result has been that I feel like I'm producing a lot more sound with the guitar, although the reality may be that it seems louder because the music is coming through more clearly. To use another metaphor, you could look at it like an improvement in the signal to noise ratio.

Conflicting advice

This is a tricky one. I have a moderate-sized collection of guitar method books, which I like because there's always something interesting to learn from a good one. Sometimes just one new insight can make it worthwhile.

Lately, I've been pondering "The Art of Classical Guitar Playing" by Charles Duncanwhich is loaded with really interesting insight and what sounds, at first glance, like advice which conflicts with other methods I have read. While many authors write about staying as relaxed as possible while playing, Duncan talks about maintaining functional tension (that is, tension which helps your playing) and avoiding dysfunctional tension (which hinders your playing).

This is a bit of a paraphrase, but one specific example I can think of is where he says "an effective playing position is not so much a repose as it is an equilibrium of forces." Meaning that he recommends that rather than finding a totally loose, passive way of holding the guitar, that you instead should use the natural springiness of the body to hold things solidly in place. However, if you were to force yourself into a position resembling the photo in the book without understanding the method behind it, you could very well end up using a lot of dysfunctional tension to maintain that position.


It occurred to me recently, in an email discussion with Philip Hii about his Art of Virtuosity books, that the main differences between what these authors are saying could largely be a matter of terminology and perception. After all, if you truly eliminated all tension in your body, you would pretty much just fall down in a heap. Where one author may say "relaxed," another may say "using balanced forces." This shouldn't be a big revelation but it may account for why seemingly opposite approaches can produce virtuosic results for different authors. They may not really be opposite at all, when you get down to the actual intended experience of playing.



This is why I think that while books have their place, the best "method" is still to find a good teacher and keep an open mind.

Visualization followup

I think that unless I have the time to devote my full undivided attention to this process, it's probably best to work in small chunks, probably with overlap. I went for an hour-long walk yesterday and tried to mentally play through the whole Bach cello suite, but it was too hard to maintain my attention with all the sensory input of being outdoors walking around town. I found myself easily distracted by things like crossing the street and trying not to get hit by cars. :)

Visualization

This topic comes up an awful lot, and I'm not going to go into too much detail about the process, per se. Here is a good article on it from Richard Provost's book The Art and Technique of Practice to get you started if you don't know what I mean.

I've been working on Bach's cello suite #3, and as of a week and a half ago, I considered myself successful in memorizing the whole thing... Which was a nice accomplishment for me, since it's the longest single work I have committed to memory so far with the intention to perform. Well, in anticipation of my lesson last week, I recorded it for my teacher and frankly, it was a bit of a disaster.

At first I tried to rationalize it, saying the music is still new to me, and it was first thing in the morning with no warmup, and, being doubtful of the security of my memory, I had the music in front of me "just in case." I didn't put too much stock in the disastrous nature of this recording, because of those factors, but during the lesson it dawned on me that it probably WAS as well as I could have expected to perform it for an audience. There are all sorts of factors going on which can affect a performance, and the reality was that my memory of the piece was not strong enough to pull it off.

That's OK, because the performance is still months away, but I decided to accept this wake up call and get to work on it. I have been using a visualization process in which I play through each movement continuously in my head; hearing each note and feeling the correct fingering for each hand, without hesitation. This means that, for the left hand, I try to "feel" shapes, shifts, and stretches, too, even though my hands are not actually moving. And this, I think is the key; I have used visualization techniques before in the past but (and I thank Eloise Ristad's A Soprano on Her Head: Right-Side-Up Reflections on Life and Other Performances for my current understanding of it) now I am adding this specific muscle "pre-memory" aspect with great success. It has hard to say what is actually going on; it is sort of muscle memory, in that I think you need familiarity with the right kinds of motions to do this, but really what you are doing is imagining what it feels like to go through the motions of playing.

The big "a ha!" for me was after I went through this process for the entire suite twice, once before bed and a second time after I woke up in the morning but before I got up. I got up, had breakfast, went to my practice room and played the entire suite. At first, it was slightly shaky in the prelude, but soon I fell right into the music and played through the whole thing better than I ever have before.

It was not a flawless run-through and I think it would be too much to hope for perfection overnight no matter how many examples the "technique of performance" and similar books use of instantaneous success after a spontaneous insight. Truthfully, I fell a bit short of the "without hesitation" goal even in the visualization process, but that is part of the point; I found where I didn't know the music as well as I should, and was perhaps relying on muscle memory along when playing.

The important thing, though, is that with few exceptions, in that run-through I felt like I could trust my body to play do the motions of playing the music correctly, and I felt more free to perform from my imagination rather than my technique. What's more is that I found that I was more relaxed as I played, breathing easily and playing more effortlessly than before. Whether that came from the sense of security, or the fact that it didn't occur to me to visualize being tense, I don't know. :)

I felt so good about this experience, that I have made it a primary means of working on the music. My approach now is to work through music like this away from the guitar, reinforcing my memory of the piece until I can play it without hesitation. I do this as close to performance tempo as I can manage without losing sight of the details. When I do play on the guitar, I play through as slowly and deliberately as I need to be sure to do it correctly. If something goes wrong, I go over that section again correctly afterwards on its own and then with surrounding context from the piece.

My aim is to do the visualization work and slow practice daily, and play through once at performance tempo after 3-4 times I have played through slowly, to test the process. The process can feel a bit tedious and I think it's important to be able to see and enjoy the progress to maintain the motivation to keep it up.

I began this particular experiment last Tuesday, June 8th. I'll report back on how it's going in another week or two.

Coordination vs control

Today I managed to increase my scale speed by nearly 20%. I've done a lot of right hand work lately, but what seems to have done it today is a shift in thinking, to use relaxed sympathetic motion instead of trying to 'activate' the fingers individually. In other words, instead of thinking of i&m alternating, to move them as a unit led by one or the other, and conceptually, aiming for relaxed coordination rather than exerted control.

I put together an exercise to work on this, which has done the trick for me. Work on each group separately, lightly and quickly as possible, and preparing each motion at the earliest opportunity. Feel each repetition as a single impulse, and allow yourself to relax completely after each rep before repeating. Don't worry about working with a metronome, just see how fast you can do it. When it feels natural, try some scales and try to maintain the same mental and physical state.

This is a different way of working than I presented in my recent post about developing the right hand. I am having dramatically faster results with this new way of working, but I can't say for sure whether it should replace the other way or be used in tandem.