If the Crux Is True, All Else Will Follow

If you’ve been following this blog since the beginning, you might recall my Rockette exercise. You also might have noticed its current and conspicuous absence. This exercise has fallen from my favor, and it’s taken time to puzzle out why I found it so unproductive. Slowly I’ve come to believe that it missed the point of what I’m trying to accomplish. The reason is subtle and requires explanation.

I now believe that good i and m alternation is a movement my hand can already do. To see what I mean, hold your hand in front of you, wrist aligned and fingers loosely curled. Now begin alternating i with m-a-c. I can do this easily, with all the speed I would need for a fast scale up to 160. My fingers move effortlessly and correctly, a-c easily moving with m. Further, I believe almost anyone with a normal right hand can learn to do this basic movement.

But woe unto me and anyone like me when this simple movement is done on a guitar string. For most of us, the string resistance gums up the movement horribly. This is where so many guitarists like me go off the tracks. We work on right hand alternation and arpeggios long before a good movement and feel are securely ingrained. The string resistance deflects our right hand into excessively tense movements. Unfortunately, we little note this at first. We’re not yet trying fast scales or arpeggios, so the excess tension isn’t obvious, particularly to inexperienced players. So we’re blissfully unaware that we’re setting the stage for future disaster. Unaware of what’s happening, we ingrain these excessively tense movements. This becomes our normal feel, long before we move on to more challenging things. What makes this especially pernicious is that we don’t encounter the full effect of the problem until we’re well past the time during which we ingrained the excessively tense movement. The bug in the system lies dormant for so long that when it finally becomes apparent, we’re at a loss to understand what it is and why it’s there.

Sadly, the blame often falls elsewhere. Usually, it’s written off as a matter of talent. Some people have it, some don’t. If you have it, hooray for you, and book Carnegie Hall. If you don’t have it, oh well, at least you can buy a ticket to Carnegie Hall.

Getting back to my Rockette exercise, I now think it slightly but crucially misses the mark. It forces the fingers into an unnatural movement that doesn’t closely mimic the all important feel of good alternation. It favors an intellectual abstraction—more movement ingrains relaxation—over the feel of relaxation itself. Mind you, this abstraction isn’t wrong. Greater movement does tend to avoid the bugaboo of excessively restricting movement. (Advocates of “economy of movement” sometimes misinterpret it to mean that smaller movements are always better than large movements. This is simply wrong, as anyone who’s seen a good golf swing can attest.) But remember the easy feel of doing right hand alternation in thin air, away from the resistance of a guitar string? That’s the thing itself, the hint to how good right hand technique really feels. The Rockette exercise distracts from the crucial thing itself. If we’re deflected from the crux, we might never get where we’re trying to go.

The Rockette exercise is gone. In its place is extended lite, gradually sped up as a good feel takes hold. Let’s see how the new kid does.

——[My next update will be October 4, 2011]——

Intermission

Busy weekend. No time for a long post. Went to a recital this evening. Met a couple of guitar graduate students from the Cleveland Institute of Music. One of them asked me: “Are you the guy doing the right hand blog?” When I replied that I was, he turned to the other guitarist and said, “I thought it was him.”

Thinking about it afterward, I couldn’t decide whether he found my blog worthwhile or that he just wanted to see what kind of damned fool was writing it. I hope it was the former.

More next week.

——[My next update will be September 26, 2011]——

Extended Lite & Speed Bursts

Slow and careful practice is fine to a point, but I can’t learn speed slowly. To get speed, I have to do speed. So speed bursts, in which I’d lost faith months ago, have nosed their way back into my practice sessions.

I begin each right hand session with five minutes of finger push-ups. I still believe finger strength is a necessary part of improving my right hand. That means finger push-ups—along with sweeps and rasgueado—will stay in my right hand sessions. Then I begin what I call my “extended lite” work. In this, I lightly play i and m rest stroke alternation on one string for extended passages. (You can see samples of this on my September 3 video.) The light playing ensures that my fingers move correctly, without my a and c fingers locking up as they would if I played harder. It also ensures that i and m snap smartly through the string, with no sideways deflection caused by pushing hard against the string’s tension. As I’ve explained before, I’m ambivalent about this light playing. I eventually want to be able to alternate quickly at any dynamic level. But for now, it’s essential that I ingrain good and relaxed movement of my fingers.

I do extended lite for about twenty minutes, frequently stopping to rest my right arm. After this, I move on to very short speed bursts, beginning at 120. Here I play at a more normal dynamic level. But I’ve added a wrinkle that I hope will better sensitize me to excess tension. I’ve noticed that when I do speed bursts, they almost always sound like this:

 ...getting louder through the burst. This, of course, means my hand tenses up through the burst, something I want to avoid. Thus, I try to maintain an even volume through the burst, or even decrescendo—then my hand won’t tighten up. So this is what I’m shooting for each time I work on short bursts. If I can gradually eliminate this tight sensation, then I hope eventually I’ll be able to double or triple the length of these bursts. This would bring me closer to extended alternation up to 184 with a relaxed hand.

When I first began doing extended lite work followed by speed bursts, there was always a clear distinction between the two—one felt completely different from the other. That’s not good. But over the last week, I’m feeling more of a segue between them. It helps that I’ve lately been able to begin my extended lite work at 92. By the end of it, I’m at 112, which isn’t far from the 120 tempo at which I begin speed bursts. More and more, the feel I have at the end of my extended lite work is similar to the feel when I begin my speed bursts at 120. This is exactly what I’m aiming for. As much as possible, I want my hand to feel pretty much the same at a wide range of speeds. Only at the extreme limit of speed would my hand begin to feel tight.

I’m still better at speed on basses rather than trebles. But the third string is starting to feel a bit more hospitable. I’ll keep at it.

On the bright side, I’ve breached several more barriers during the week. On Monday morning at 8:39 I hit a short burst at 192. (Yes, I really did write down the time. Humor me.) Five minutes later I hit a short burst at 200. By the way, 200 is so damned fast that after I hit the burst, I sat quietly wondering if I’d really done it. It took me a minute to convince myself that I’d actually done a burst at 200. Maybe I need what they have at hockey games: a light and klaxon that go off whenever I accurately hit a high speed burst.

And on Thursday morning at 7:58, I hit a short burst at 208. Hey, since my metronome only goes up to 208, maybe I can declare victory and close down my project.

On the bad side, I may have to delay my promised end of September video performance of the Mudarra Galliard. The problem right now is that there’s almost no spillover from my technique work to my normal playing. What I can do in the laboratory doesn’t work in the rough and tumble world of real playing. For the moment, I’m okay with that. This new approach seems to be getting somewhere, and I’m willing to change the game plan and ride it wherever it may go.

But I’m determined to prove I can hit a short burst at 200. So that will be my new end-of-the-month video goal.

——[My next update will be September 19, 2011]——

September 3 Video Update

When the Philological Society of London decided in 1857 that a new English dictionary was needed, it was estimated that it would take about ten years to complete. This was a tad optimistic. The work that culminated in the Oxford English Dictionary took over seven decades to complete.

Closer to home, I probably underestimated the immensity of my project.

Here’s a sobering line of thought. Reading a book about neuroplasticity, I encountered the assertion that mastering a physical skill might take some 100,000 repetitions. Such assertions necessarily are approximate, of course, and beg the question of how anyone knows this to be so. But let’s take it as a given. Doing some quick ciphering, I can do 2400 reps in an hour—that accounts for non-rep time devoted to strength and conditioning, taking rest breaks, tuning the odd recalcitrant string, and stopping to investigate a mysterious crash caused by a curious cat. This works out to 100,000 reps in, according to my calculator, 41.666667 hours. (Love those irrational numbers.) So working an hour a day five days a week, it would take roughly two months to master a given skill. That in itself is daunting.

On top of that, however, my quick cipher ignores limiting factors. For example, those repetitions can’t be mindless—rather, they must be purposeful and carefully controlled. And I can concentrate only for so long in one sitting. That in itself limits the number of reps I can do in any one session. Further, my right hand project isn’t merely one skill. It’s actually a constellation of interlocking skills, each of which needs its own time and attention to master. Thinking this through realistically, it’s easy to see how my little project balloons exponentially.

On the bright side, when a man’s reach exceeds his grasp, he’ll at least be everlastingly engaged in interesting work. So I’ll always have a reason to get up in the morning.

My end of August (or beginning of September) video report is up and running. Rather than jabber endlessly on camera, I’ve opted for a Marcel Marceau document of how I’m currently working on rest stroke alternation. Though there are other things I do during my morning sessions, the video concentrates on the bulk of what I’m currently doing. Enjoy.

——[My next update will be September 12, 2011]——