I Have Met the Enemy, and He Is Me

It’s all boiled down to this:

...which is pretty basic stuff. But i and m alternation is pretty basic stuff, so it’s not surprising that I’m now down to brass tacks. Why the repeated m strokes? Two reasons: they ensure that a is comfortably moving with m, and they help my hand relax between the bits of i and m alternation. The tempo indicated isn’t where I started this week. I began at 50, still not alternation, but more a series of separate strokes. From there I slowly worked my way up the metronome. By Thursday my hand was relaxed enough that it still felt comfortable at 80. This tempo is also where, for me, it starts to feel like alternation rather than separate strokes. So for now, this will be the tempo from which I tip-toe into higher speeds. No problems with my right shoulder to report.

A benefit of this project is that I’m becoming far more aware of why my right hand has so much trouble with alternation. For example, I now know beyond any doubt that my hand has all the raw speed it needs to do alternation well at a high speed. Here’s what I mean. My middle finger can easily do two notes per click at 180, and so can my index finger. Further, when m by itself does two notes per click at 180, a easily moves with it. No effort required, it just does it. But if I try to do alternation at even half that speed, suddenly my hand tightens up. Part of the reason, I believe, is that a responds to the opposite movement of i. I’ve noticed that as m extends away from the string, it’s little affected by i moving in the opposite direction. But a, in mid-flight and following m, slightly pulls up short as i pushes into the string. What’s curious to me is that, apparently, a is more influenced by i than is m. Seems odd, since m is right next to i, I’d assume it’s more influenced by i. But for me at least, m seems happy to ignore the opposite direction of i during alternation, whereas a doesn’t.

Also, the tension of a guitar string plays a crucial role. I’ve no problem drumming my fingers on a desk top at 180, and a easily moves with m as I do it. But try the same movement on any guitar string, where the tension pushes against the fingers, then that ease vanishes.

The problem isn’t raw speed—rather, it’s coordination.

I sense experienced guitarists around the world slapping their foreheads and crying: “Sheesh, you’re just figuring this out after almost three months of work?” Bear with me a moment as I explain further. It’s one thing to say that any deficiency of technique is in essence a coordination problem. That’s hardly a revelation. But it’s quite another thing to pin down exactly what that means. And I believe this is a far more elusive thing than most players and teachers know.

Consider the following scenario. Imagine someone who aspires to be a world class sprinter. He’s lean and athletic, by all appearances likely to excel with proper training. So he’s taken on by a knowledgeable coach. Now imagine this aspiring sprinter has invisible weights strapped to his feet. These weights have been there all his life. He’s unaware of them, and since they’re invisible, no one else can see them. Throughout his training, he never can match the performance of other sprinters who aren’t hampered with these weights. His coach tries every type of exercise he knows, but our aspiring sprinter never improves enough to become a world class athlete. Eventually both the coach and the aspiring sprinter give up. Neither ever knows the true cause of the failure. The coach never knows because he can’t see the weights, nor can he feel what the aspiring sprinter feels. The aspiring sprinter never knows because this excess weight is all he’s ever known, and thus feels perfectly normal to him. He’s unaware that other sprinters aren’t similarly encumbered.

Bear in mind that, in this scenario, the basic solution is simple: remove the invisible weights. But how would anyone hit on this solution? The coach can’t help the athlete because he can’t see the weights, nor can he feel what the athlete is feeling. The athlete can’t help the coach because he’s unaware that he’s fighting a handicap that others don’t have. It would take a leap of imagination for anyone to understand the true cause of the failure. Sadly, it’s unlikely that either the coach or the athlete could make this leap.

Most of us are imprisoned by our own experience. Whenever we encounter something novel, our instinct is to relate it to what we already know. If the novelty is far outside our experience, we’re unlikely to see it for what it is. Rather, we relate it to whatever previous experience seems to fit, however inapt it might be. Indeed, much of human progress is a slow and fitful crawl, where long held misunderstandings are chipped away by an accretion of tiny insights, painstakingly assembled into a new and better understanding. Quantum leaps are rare.

When it comes to progress, we are each our own worst enemy.


——[My next post will be on April 4, 2011.]——

Waiting for the Water to Boil

Writing about practice, the Russian piano teacher Heinrich Neuhaus described the following scenario. You want to boil a pot of potatoes. So you set a pot of water on a fire. Before the water heats up, you remove the pot from the fire and do something else. Later, you put the pot of water back on the fire. Then, again, you remove the pot before the water heats up and do something else. You repeat this many times. Obviously the water never heats to a boil, and your potatoes never get cooked. Neuhaus’ point was that, when practicing, you have to stay with something long enough for the water to boil. Only then can you get something done.

So for the rest of this month the pot will sit on the fire. My 30 minute alternation sessions have boiled down to this:

You can’t get much more basic than this. But there’s a lot going on in this deceptively simple exercise. Every moment, I’m trying to keep the feel light and easy. On each stroke, my finger plays and immediately releases back to its starting point near the string. I’m aware that at this speed I’m not doing alternation—it’s more like separate strokes for each finger. In fact, I’m purposely trying to avoid alternation for now. I’ve found that when I try to bump the speed up to where it starts to feel like alternation, the easy and light feel vanishes. Instead, it’s replaced by my old familiar tense and clunky feel. That feel is no longer acceptable to me. Instead, I begin with a tempo of 100. When it feels free and easy, I up the tempo a bit. If it feels good, I stay there a moment and then up it a bit more. If it starts to feel bad, I retreat to a tempo where the bad feeling disappears. Rinse and repeat.

Having worked on my right hand project for two and a half months, I’m amazed at how bad my alternation now feels. Individual rest strokes feel quite good to me. But the instant i and m move simultaneously in opposite directions—a defining characteristic of alternation—my hand feels very different, and the difference isn’t a good one. Yet I see this as an encouraging sign. An early stage of ingraining a new good feel is that the old feel to which I was once inured is now intolerable. To be sure, this isn’t a fun place to be. Indeed, it’s a kind of no man’s land: I’m not where I want to be, and I refuse go back to where I was. Well, sometimes life is unbearably tragic.

I need to be careful of long and uninterrupted practice sessions. While I’m not doing speed work, it’s very easy for me to fall into a zone of continuous play for 30 minutes at a stretch. That’s the kind of thing that caused trouble in the past. I keep reminding myself to take frequent breaks to relax my right shoulder. So far, no trouble to report on that front.

Compelling to me is the fact that, done right, play and release apparently bypasses questions I earlier puzzled over. For example, I earlier wondered if I needed to tinker with my hand position to equalize the different lengths of i and m. With play and release, this question melts away to irrelevancy. My fingers fall into a comfortable groove, and their different lengths just seem to sort themselves out with no real effort. This, I hope, is the hallmark of a good approach. When problems seem to sort themselves out, one might be on the right track.

Lest we forget, my right hand arpeggio work is proceeding apace. Until this week, I’d kept the speed of my arpeggios very slow. But now I’m inching up the tempo a bit. (For you non-Americans, that would be centimetering up the tempo.) I’ve no great improvement to report, but my arpeggios do feel a tad better than before I began this project. But it’s a small improvement, possibly a product of wishful thinking rather than real accomplishment.

So I’ll continue with my practice sessions and staring at the water pot.

Apropos of nothing, I’d like to close this post with a brief conversation I had with one of my students, an eleven year old girl. She was trying to play her assigned piece and making a botch of it, repeatedly starting and stopping. It prompted this exchange:

Me: “I’d like to hear this once before I die.”

Student: “You’re not gonna die.”

Me: “Well, thank you!”

Student: “Wait, how old are you?”


——[My next post will be on March 28, 2011.]——

Simplicity Begins as a Very Complex Thing

Play and release is my new mantra. This week I spent most of my 30 minute i and m alternation work on this:


On each m stroke, my middle finger immediately releases back to its relaxed position, poised near the string and ready for another stroke. Why so many m stokes compared to i? Because m is the problem finger, not i. All week I did this no faster than a metronome setting of 80. No speed bursts. Okay, I tried a few on Friday, but the horrid results sent me scurrying back to the slower speed. My goal is to deeply ingrain this new and relaxed feel, so that when I speed up, the relaxed feel becomes my natural response.

Judging from my previous posts, you might assume that alternation is all I’m working on. But I’m still doing 15 minutes of arpeggio studies. One of the pieces I play is very familiar to classical guitarists, Mauro Giuliani’s Op. 48, no. 5:


Another is Ferdinando Carulli’s Fandango, Op. 72, No. 3:


...which I like because it offers a variety of basic right hand movements and is fun to play. I also add a little more concentrated work on alternating between i and m-a:


I do all this very slowly, with a lot of prepared stroke. About a month ago, I noticed that when I do an arpeggio in which a plays after m, a tenses as m plays, probably because it wants to go with m. So during arpeggio practice, I’m paying close attention to keeping a very relaxed as m plays. By the way, the irony that a wants very badly to move with m during arpeggios but not during i and m alternation isn’t lost on me. On my hand at least, the ring finger is one very mixed up dude.

I’m still doing 5 minutes of right hand sweeps and rasgueados. And I’m also still ending with 10 minutes of stretches for both hands. Since I’m doing very little speed work this month, my right shoulder feels great.

Now to address some comments and questions:

“I don’t know your entire history so maybe this question has already been answered: since the a finger follows naturally with m, what did you do in the past to get away from that?”—Rick

...and:

“I’m most definitely missing something. You are saying that, for you, when m plucked, a did not follow? Really? The m & a fingers are tied together by tendons.”—ES, Pennsylvania, USA

...and:

“Someday you are going to listen me and get it in few days. It’s just
a matter of time. Independence of fingers is not moving one finger with or against another finger, it is the ability to move one finger while the other is completely (whatever that means) relaxed. If you learn to relax the a finger while m is flexing, it will naturally move along with m.”—KM, Alabama, USA

I sense a whiff of edginess in these comments and questions. There seems an honest incredulity that what I’m trying to accomplish should be so difficult and takes so long. After all, doesn’t a naturally want to move with m during alternation? So what’s the problem?

As a prelude to a reply, let’s try a thought experiment. Assume that 200 classical guitarists are following my little project. And imagine that, instead of sitting at our computers scattered about the world, we’re all sitting in a recital hall, with me on stage fielding questions about what I’m doing. (Okay, to make it worth your while, I’ll treat everyone to dinner at Olive Garden afterward.)

After hearing me expound at length, someone in exasperation asks: “Geez, Tom, how hard can this be? Just move a with m and be done with it.”

Miffed, I reply: “Okay, everyone come on stage and play a two octave scale cleanly with i and m alternation at 180, moving a with m. I’ll give $100 to each person who can do it. Those who can’t will give me $25.”

Can we all agree that I’m likely to come out ahead on this bet? (Don’t worry, I’ll spend my winnings on the dinner at Olive Garden.) So if what I’m trying to do is so apparently simple, then why can’t most of us do it?

The answer, in short, is that speed complicates what should be a simple thing. If I slowly play a few notes with m, a will easily and naturally follow. But i and m alternation isn’t a series of slowly played notes. What happens easily and naturally at a slower speed doesn’t necessarily happen at a high speed. For many guitarists, high speed alternation becomes very problematic. The easy and natural movement of a with m goes right out the window.

Virtuosos make the destination look easy. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to get there.


——[My next post will be on March 21, 2011.]——

Zen and the Art of Guitar Playing

There are times in my life when I spend day after day pounding against a locked door. Then one day, taking a break to rest my aching fists before another round of fruitless pounding, I look to the left or right. And there, just a few paces away, is another door. I walk over and try it. The door is unlocked. Sheepishly, I go through and continue on my way, hoping no one noticed my days of pounding on the locked door.

After my meeting with Colin Davin last Saturday, I revamped my 30 minute session of i and m alternation. Gone is the Rockette exercise, and gone are the speed bursts. Instead, I begin with five minutes of the finger pushups described in my last post. Then I continue with 25 minutes of the play and release exercise. Right away I found something tantalizing. When my middle finger plays and then quickly and lightly releases back to its ready position, my ring finger goes right with it. More compelling, I don’t have to make my ring finger move with m. It just does it, naturally and effortlessly.

Okay, let’s get this straight. I spent years trying to get my a finger to move with m during alternation, to no avail. I even tried taping them together. (Tried that for about a week two years ago. Didn’t work.) Since the beginning of January I’ve redoubled my efforts. I’ve compelled, coaxed, cajoled, wheedled, begged, and pleaded with a to move with m. In darker moments, I’ve threatened it with a steak knife. Nothing worked.

And now the old play and release exercise—something I’ve done many times before with no good results—suddenly works with almost no effort. I succeed by barely trying. So rather than forcing my ring finger to do what I want, I beguile it to do what I want through its own free will. How very Zen. What’s also very Zen is that it’s taken so long to arrive at this revelation, which tempts me to indulge in some very un-Zen swearing.

So for now I’m not trying for speed in any way. In fact, I’m not even trying alternation. Instead, I’m doing little more than this:

As each finger plays, it immediately releases back to its ready position. I do this no faster than a metronome setting of 80. Since each finger plays separately, this isn’t alternation. I do this on all six strings. But other than that, it’s just 25 minutes of very light play and release. When I do it right, this exercise entirely bypasses the effort of making my a finger move with m. Instead, my a finger just does it, following m like a faithful little dog. It looks exactly like Colin’s right hand when he does alternation. Unlike Colin, I can’t yet do this during alternation. I suspect I’ve at least a solid month of play and release practice before I can even think of trying alternation again—much less speed bursts. So be it.

By the way, I want to retract something I wrote in my February 27th post. I described the play and release exercise as though my finger was “hopping on a trampoline.” I now believe that, done well, play and release is nothing like a trampoline effect. In fact, when my finger contacts the adjacent string, it barely drives into the string at all. The release begins so quickly that I feel no pressure from the adjacent string. My finger isn’t pushed away by the tension of the adjacent string—rather, it hops off the string after barely touching it.

This week was a reminder of something essential. In playing a musical instrument, how it feels is more important than how it looks. To be sure, visual cues are important. We need them when groping toward a fluency we don’t yet have. But visual cues can only hint at a direction. The ultimate goal of technical practice is the feel of an easy and fluid movement. Indeed, technique reflects the sound it produces: ugly technique produces ugly sound—beautiful technique produces beautiful sound.

Beauty is a noble goal, worthy of my time and effort.


——[My next post will be on March 14, 2011.]——