Training the Musical Pooch

Throughout this project, I’ve operated on the assumption that if something isn’t producing results within two or three months, then I’m doing something wrong. I don’t expect to get from here to there in one grand leap. But I do expect progress, however slight it may be. Thus far progress has been wanting.

Over the last few weeks, a somewhat different approach has been brewing in my brain. It’s a bit hard to explain. Nonetheless, I’ll try.

Consider training a dog. Let’s say you want to train a dog to do the following in this order: sit, bark, roll over, sit, beg. That’s a long sequence, one the dog isn’t likely to do correctly on his own. You could try training the dog through negative reinforcement, punishing it every time it doesn’t do what you want. But the dog doesn’t understand what you’re trying to get him to do, nor does he know why you’re punishing him. You may eventually train the dog to do the sequence correctly, but at a high price. The dog will be confused and fearful, and will always perform the sequence for no other reason than to avoid punishment. In essence, the dog’s natural behavior has been forcibly twisted into something he doesn’t like doing. No permanent behavior change is accomplished. Take away the punishment, and the dog will drop the new behavior you’ve painfully forced him to learn. Not only that, but you’ll likely have created a dog who’s confused and fearful around you and perhaps every other human he encounters.

As professional animal trainers know, there’s a better way to train the dog, and it goes something like this. Put the dog and yourself in an enclosed space—one that’s large enough that the dog doesn’t feel confined, but small enough to keep you and the dog in close proximity. Have a generous supply of dog treats with you. Watch the dog carefully. If he runs about in all directions, say and do nothing. But if he trots up to you, praise him and give him a treat. Soon the dog associates going to you with getting a treat. When he does this consistently, now reward him only if he comes to you and sits. If he does anything else, do nothing, but the instant he sits, praise him and give him a treat. Soon the dog learns that sitting is rewarded and starts doing it consistently. Then you add another behavior. And another, and another, until the dog has learned the entire sequence.

Notice that you’re never forcing the dog to do anything. The dog is doing all the things a dog naturally does—most of them aren’t what you want him to do. You’re merely selecting and rewarding specific behaviors. Everyone is happy: the dog is getting praise and treats, and you’re teaching the dog the sequence of behaviors you want him to perform.

This analogy only goes so far in a guitarist’s right hand training. Obviously my right hand isn’t wagging a tail and excitedly trying to figure out what I want it to do. But there’s an illuminating parallel here. When training my right hand, I first need to be very specific about what I want it to learn. Once I define precisely what I’m trying to accomplish, I then begin at whatever point my hand easily and automatically does what I’m trying to accomplish. I don’t force it to do anything. Rather, I try to find a situation in which my hand naturally does the specific thing I’m trying to ingrain. That situation might be far from real guitar playing, but that’s not important. What’s important is that I find a place where my right hand already does the right thing. That’s my starting point, and I can go forward from there.

For my hand, the goal is specific. The a finger should move easily with m whenever doing i and m alternation. Further, the feel should be free and easy. In fact, a moving with m is a byproduct of this all-important feel. In previous posts I’ve questioned whether this was necessary. No longer. I’m convinced that a (and to a lesser extent, the little finger) must move with m during alternation. I don’t care that some guitarists—very good ones, in fact—do otherwise. John Williams, for example, often extends his little finger when doing i and m alternation. But his hand isn’t my hand. I’ve worked at this long enough to know there’s no way around it.

So here are the basic steps I’m following.

Step 1: I begin with what my hand can do. For me, that’s extremely basic. Away from the guitar, holding my hand in front of me, I can easily move m-a-c together. The movement is simple and natural. I don’t have to force a and c to move with m. They simply do it. In fact, it’s harder to not do it then to do it. So that’s where I start, and I move in tiny steps from there.

Step 2: I drum my fingers on the guitar soundboard. This isn’t as easy as merely waving my fingers in the air. But it’s sufficiently close to Step 1 that the difficulty isn’t excessive. It doesn’t take much effort to maintain the easy movement I’m aiming for.

Step 3: Play very lightly on a string. This is a crucial leap, and it’s very hard to maintain the same feel and movement I had in Step 2. I choose the easiest string—for me, it’s the sixth string—and I do it very lightly and not very fast. I start at four notes per click at 72, and try to maintain as closely as possible the feel and movement I had in the first two steps.

Crucial to this approach is that each step should be only incrementally more difficult than the last. Once I’ve established the movement and feel in Step 1, at no subsequent step should I lose them. Quantum leaps are strictly avoided.

I’m now convinced that much of the work I’ve done so far has been wasted. Instead of cultivating what my hand can already do, I’ve instead tried to force it to do what it’s not yet ready to do. As an extreme example, you might recall I mentioned that several years ago I tried taping my m and a fingers together, to see if this would train them to move together in alternation. It didn’t work, and now I know why. Like the dog who’s punished into doing something he doesn’t understand or want to do, I wasn’t really training my hand to do anything useful. Rather, I was training my fingers to move together only when forcibly restrained. Absent the restraint, my fingers would simply revert to their old subpar movement and feel.

Even the less drastic things I’ve tried—remember the Rockettes exercise?—were still missing the point. The key, I now believe, isn’t to force my fingers to do the right thing. The key is to begin with the right thing and then very gradually increase the difficulty under which the right thing is done. So I start with finger-flapping in thin air. Then on to drumming on the soundboard. Then so on. On through single string alternation. On through gradually more extended alternation. On through string crossing. On through gradually increasing volume. On through varying tone color. And on until it’s a reliable musical technique.

At every step, my success depends on how well I evaluate where I am, and how creatively I design and practice each incremental step. If I don’t accurately recognize each new level of difficulty as it crops up, then I’ll overreach and ultimately fail. But the advantage to this approach lies in its immediacy. Remember, each next step should be only a bit harder than the last. If I try a next step and the correct movement and feel fall apart, then I’m overreaching. So in a practical way, this approach is self-correcting: if at any point I loose the correct movement and feel, then I’m doing it wrong. Step back, rethink, and try again. This strikes me as as much better than simply pounding away and hoping for the best.

This is a rough sketch of what I’m now doing. But Saturday morning I got an intriguing glimpse of its potential. I have a young student who has an ongoing problem with her little finger extending whenever she does an arpeggio with the other fingers. So during our last lesson, I briefly described the approach. I then had her begin with Step 1, as described above. She did this easily. Then she tried Step 2, which again she managed quickly and easily. Then she moved to Step 3, doing i and m alternation on a single string. She told me that for her the first string was easier, so I agreed that this was the string she should begin with. In a matter of seconds, her i and m alternation was perfect, with a and c faithfully moving with m. It was beautiful to watch. In one brief session, her hand looked like that of an excellent concert artist. Obviously she has much work ahead to consolidate this into a reliable technique. But she has the movement and, far more importantly, she has the feel.

I’m as cautiously excited about this as I’ve ever been throughout this project. I really believe I’m on to something good. Time, as always, will tell.

•                              •                              •

Below is my end of the month video update. Watching it, I notice that when drumming my fingers on the soundboard, my little finger locked up. I also notice that this problem disappeared when I went on to single string alternation. Obviously I’m more concerned with what happens during actual playing. Be that as it may, I’ll work on improving what happens during the drumming.

——[My next update will be November 7, 2011]——

Another Week, Another Infinitesimal Sliver of Progress

The longer I do this, the more clear it becomes what I’m up against. The excess tension that steps in whenever I try right hand speed is a familiar enemy now, down to the finest detail. I can, for example, say at what speed it first appears when I try extended i and m alternation. (Up to 84, everything is okay—after 84, things fall apart.) When doing a six string descending scale, I can say exactly where it feels bad, and exactly where it feels good. (On the second and third strings, my fingers hang up—on the fourth through sixth strings, my hand feels much freer.)

What I hope is that understanding the problem in finer detail will mean coming up with better solutions. Take, for example, the hang up on the second and third strings during a descending scale. I noticed I was blending two different string crossing techniques during a descending six string scale: at the beginning of the scale, I’d pivot from the elbow alone, but as my fingers came through the second and third strings, I’d then cross from the elbow and shoulder. Maybe, I reasoned, this is unnecessarily complex. So now I’m simplifying the crossing by moving from the elbow and shoulder throughout a six string scale. We’ll see if this pays off.

My progress, as always, is glacially incremental. I’m trying to extend the length of my bursts. I’ve found I can fairly consistently play the last three strings of a descending scale cleanly at 120. This, for example, is getting pretty reliable:

So that’s something. Above 120 is still a problem. But remember that my interim goal is reliable scales at 120. If I can establish a foothold there, then maybe higher speed will be within my grasp.

I begin each session with five minutes of finger push-ups. Then I set the metronome at 84 and do extended alternation on each string individually. After that, it’s on to this at 84:

If this goes okay, I bump up the tempo one notch at a time. (For the week, I found I could hit it in the mid 90’s before my hand tensed up.) After that, it’s on to the exercises I described in the beginning of last week’s post. Sometimes I stay with this until it’s time for sweeps, rasgueados, and stretches. Other times I’ll do five or ten minutes of arpeggios, tremolo, and cross-string trills.

•                              •                              •

One interesting tidbit came up during the week. On Tuesday, my right hand session was awful. Indeed, it was so bad that I quit early in disgust, omitting the fifteen minutes of sweeps, rasgueados, and finger stretches with which I normally end a session. Thinking about it afterward, I realized I was unconsciously reacting to an unpleasant phone call I had to make later that day. It was one of those things I had to do but would rather not. It became clear that this impending unpleasantness infected my attitude toward practice. In fact, after this bad practice session the problem unexpectedly resolved itself in a way far better than I’d hoped. And sure enough, the next morning my practice session was more productive and pleasant.

This reminded me once again that a positive attitude is vital to practice. I can’t let myself get thrown off by the inevitable problems of day to day life.

•                              •                              •

In my October 9 post, I referred to some left hand positioning advice that I found indefensible. As I mentioned last week, this caused a surprising discussion. If you wish to follow this discussion, you can find it here.

——[My next update will be October 31, 2011]——

Busting On Bursts

Over the last week I’ve focused on trying to smooth the transition from short bursts to a continuous scale. First I warmed up with continuous alternation at 84. After this, I began with the following at 100:

When that felt comfortable, I then tried this at the same tempo:


Then finally I moved to a continuous scale, also at 100:

Obviously the idea is to gradually shorten and then remove the pauses between each one-string burst. My goal is to reduce the tension in short bursts, so that I can lengthen them into longer passages. On some days, I was able to lightly play the continuous scale at 112—one day I managed to barely hit 120. My goal, however, is to hit this cleanly and consistently, not hit or miss. So there’s much yet to be done.

As I did these exercises, I listened closely to my rhythm. I wanted each burst to snap sharply and cleanly. But more important, I was also very alert to these signs of excess tension:

• a tight feel in a and c
• a and c become rigidly extended or flexed
• clenching teeth
• tensing or hunching right shoulder
• labored breathing

Working this way, I’ve noticed my descending six string scale tends to hang up on the second and third strings. Once I get to the fourth string, it’s smooth sailing the rest of the way. In fact, right now I can pretty consistently hit 120 on the three bass strings. At first I suspected that since the third string is the only one that has two notes, this might be the reason for my awkwardness. But I’ve no problem slurring the full six string scale at a high speed with the left hand alone. So I’m guessing this is a right hand crossing problem. Obviously I’ll spend more time working to smooth out this part of the scale.

•                              •                              •

On an unrelated note, I was surprised by some of the reactions to my last post. In this post, I drew attention to a left hand positioning suggestion that was, I thought, so obviously bad that there should be little debate over it. Oy, what a can of worms that opened! More on this in next week’s post.

——[My next update will be October 24, 2011]—— 

120 or Bust

First things first. I soon realized I was playing part of the Mozart excerpt wrong and corrected it. After relearning it, I finally checked the score. My revised version is correct—hey, I even got the key right. Though to be honest, if asked to write it out, I’d have written in common time, so I’d have gotten the time signature wrong. Anyway, here’s the corrected excerpt:

My apologies to Mozart and his fans (of whom I’m one) for playing it wrong on my October 2 video.

This last week I stayed with the two exercises shown on the video. In the scale with the three string burst, I occasionally managed a tempo of 120. Anything above 120 invariably fell apart. The Mozart excerpt crept up to 84.

It occurred to me that, temporarily, I should lower my sights a bit and try a more attainable goal. I’ve decided to shoot for 120—first with a three string burst, then longer until I can do a continuous six string scale cleanly and reliably. So my specific goal is this at 120:

The repeat is an important part of my goal. I want to be able to do an extended scale at 120, not just a burst. If I can, then it’ll mean I’m well on my way to reducing my right hand tension during speed. I’ve also found over the years that descending scales feel easier to me than ascending scales. So my target scale must include extended ascending passages.

Why lower my goal to 120? I’m taking to heart something I’ve heard concert artist Jason Vieaux tell his students. He strongly advocates when learning a difficult passage that one should start slow and gradually work up the tempo one metronome notch at a time. One shouldn’t leapfrog over intermediate tempos. His reasoning is thus: At slower tempos, a particular problem might not be apparent. If you increase tempo gradually, you’ll eventually hit a tempo at which the problem just begins to be apparent. Here you can define the problem and work out a solution, all at a tempo in which you’re not going like a bat out of hell. So you carefully solve the problem and then continue your deliberate climb up the tempos. If, however, you jump over intermediate tempos, you may jump far past the tempo where the problem was easier to notice, isolate, and understand. So now you’re puzzling over something that’s gumming up the passage while playing lickety-split, something you would understand better had you first encountered it at a slower speed.

Makes sense to me. In fact, I suspect I haven’t yet attacked my right hand project with sufficient care. (Nine months of piddling progress has a way of making one rethink.) Rather than lobbing artillery shells over the horizon and hoping to hit something I can’t see, maybe I should try pistol shots at a closer target that I can see. I can hit 120 now, but I need to make it more reliable and easy. If I can do this, then perhaps I can more successfully tackle higher goals.

•                              •                              •

From time to time my project spurs discussion on various classical guitar internet forums. While I sometimes participate in these discussions, time constraints often dictate that I merely observe. Indeed, some of these discussions seem to happily thrive in my absence. A particular point, however, has come up more than once. So I’ll address it here.

On October 2, someone made this post. I replied thus. My reply brought forth the following:

Philip Hii understands something important about teaching—you cannot move your student’s hands for them. You must use whatever means you can to try to transmit your experience to them, to teach the unteachable. The feel is more important than anatomy and leverage and muscle type. We cannot control our bodies by verbal/analytical micro-instruction; we must use feel, which is kinaesthetic sense that we all have, but often suppress.

The proper approach for one who does not know, such as yourself, to learn from someone who does know—from them—is not to criticize or question them but to try to break your mind open and try again to understand.  It is the parable of the full tea cup. They are trying to help you. So don't resist. Try again... This is how you can achieve your goals. Add it to your admirable work ethic and you will succeed.

This strikes me as a thoughtful argument, and it merits a response in some detail.

I don’t have an infinite amount of time to practice. I can’t try everything, so I have to decide what to try and what to ignore. By the way, this isn’t unique to me. No player has the time to try everything. All of us discriminate between what we take to heart and what we ignore. The question, then, is how one decides.

One criterion I use is that I try to see how careful someone is in giving advice. If a person offers advice that seems well considered, then I take this person seriously. But if the advice is peppered with things that are obscure, contradictory, or just wrong, then I approach this person’s advice with some suspicion.

For my taste, Philip Hii’s “Art of Virtuosity for Guitar” falls in the latter category. I’ll offer three excerpts from the book—each in turn illustrates something I find obscure, contradictory, or wrong. Here’s the first example (if the examples below are unreadable, click on them for a larger display):

This is Hii’s first description of this stroke. Yet it’s hard to understand what he’s saying. “You play from the hand” is an unfortunate phrase—it implies that the player should pluck a string by moving the entire hand. Is this really what Hii means to say? “Pull it slightly toward you” is also vague—does Hii mean toward one’s head, toward one’s waist, or toward one’s feet?

Example 2:

Yet further in the book, Hii says this:

So here are two contradictory statements. It may be that Hii intended his earlier recommendation only for a specific exercise, and not as a general right hand technique. But he doesn’t make this clear. Thus, we’re left with two conflicting statements, both of them apparently about general right hand technique.

Example 3:

I’ve no idea why Hii recommends that the base of one’s index finger should touch the neck, nor does he offer a convincing explanation. In fact, this is something I tell students to avoid. The reasons are obvious: it cramps the fingers, and runs the risk of inadvertently muting the first string. It’s just bad advice.

I could offer other examples, but three should suffice to explain my wariness regarding Hii’s advice. That’s not to say that I dismiss everything in “Art of Virtuosity for Guitar.” But there are enough things that bother me, so I’ll look elsewhere for advice.

Doubtless some will dismiss my critique as mean-spirited nit-picking. I don’t see it that way. For me, a guitar method stands or falls on the quality of its information. Everyone decides for themselves how to evaluate this quality, and everyone has their own standards for doing so. Yours may be different from mine. So be it.

Further, whatever its merits, Hii’s book doesn’t address in detail the problems I’m encountering. I hasten to add that there’s no reason to single out Hii’s book in this regard—no guitar method I’ve seen addresses my circumstance in sufficient detail. (And that includes a method I had a hand in writing.) So for the moment, I’m pretty much on my own.

Of course, if anyone can suggest a method I’ve not yet seen, I’ll be happy to look into it.

——[My next update will be October 17, 2011]——

October 2, 2011 Video Update

Short video this time. In it, I show two things I’ve been working with recently. The first is an attempt to ease my way into a longer burst:

As you’ll hear, I’m still working with light strokes, as my hand works better when I don’t try to play loud. By the way, this is similar to a speed burst exercise I tried some years ago:

The idea here was to break down a six string scale into short one string bursts. At the time, I found it fun to do, but it has the same defect of all burst exercises: it doesn’t acclimate my hand to a good feel for longer passages. So the first exercise you’ll see on the video is something I hope will ween me off short bursts and into longer scale passages.

The second thing you’ll see is a fragment of Mozart. One day during practice it struck me as a nice thing to use for my extended lite work. Since I’m doing it from memory, I may not remember it exactly as Mozart wrote it. One day I’ll dig up my CD of this music to see if I’m playing it right.

I know I promised earlier to show I could do a short burst at 200. But it wasn’t happening this morning, and I saw no point in documenting the failure. Further, I’d lost interest in the short burst approach over the last week. For now, I prefer to try slightly longer bursts, to see if I can make them work.

As an aside, I bought Matt Palmer’s “A New Approach to Fast Scales” method book. In it, he explains his right hand three finger approach to fast scales. Those knowledgeable about guitar technique will quibble with the title—Palmer isn’t the first to do this. But the book is a detailed explanation of how to apply this technique in many musical circumstances. Personally, I think this should be used and taught far more than it is. I suspect over the next few decades we’ll see more young guitarists doing fast scales with a, m, i rather than i and m. To be sure, two finger alternation will retain its usefulness—it offers a particular force that three finger alternation might not be able to match. But the three finger approach just makes sense. It enables high speed without pushing to the limit one’s speed with any given finger.

Interestingly, Palmer’s book is of almost no help to the likes of me. It says virtually nothing about how to develop finger speed. Rather, it’s written from the perspective of someone who already has speed, and wants to increase it further. Nonetheless, I did find some glimmers of information applicable to my own situation. Here’s one bit of text I found illuminating:

My preference for playing fast scales is to use a stroke somewhere between a free stroke and a rest stroke (a “frest” stroke?)

This intrigued me, as I’ve previously posted that, when switching from rest to free stroke, I couldn’t always tell exactly which stroke I was doing. So it was encouraging to see a good player say something similar.

And here’s another bit of text that jumped out at me:

I do not commit the weight of the follow-through of the attack to produce the rest stroke sound. In contrast, I commit the weight to the plant and to the attack itself. This method seems to allow my fingers to recuperate and return to their starting positions faster. Try both methods of attack to achieve a level of comfort that suits you, and the sound quality you desire. I suggest starting with a relatively light attack as you get used to the motions required to play evenly. Once you have achieved evenness, gradually increase the power of your stroke.

This seems in keeping with my extended lite approach. In my opinion, good players like Palmer don’t always realize the importance of what they say to players like me. I think the last two sentences in the above quote should be far more emphatic—indeed, they should be expanded into a chapter of their own. Instead, they’re practically throwaway lines that the average guitarist will overlook.

In Palmer’s defense, he’s probably not writing for the likes of me. But in the real world, most of those reading his book will be more like me than Palmer. It may well be that those like Palmer can’t adequately understand and explain what those like me need to hear. Perhaps it takes the likes of me to get to where Palmer is, and then explain how I did it to those who aren’t.

That at least is part of my motivation to keep on trucking.

——[My next update will be October 10, 2011]—