Light Speed

This week I stayed true to my determination to play quietly. To be honest, I don’t much like it. The guitar is an intrinsically quiet instrument. It makes sense to to play out, getting the sound across the lip of the stage and into the audience. As a public speaker, I’ve never been one to mumble and stare at my shoes when addressing an audience. My desire to be heard carries over to guitar playing. So playing softly all the time goes against my grain.

And that’s precisely why I should keep doing it.

To be clear about something that’s gradually come into focus during this project, I’m more inclined to lean toward directions in which I’ve never before wanted to go. More and more, I’m starting to see the first year of this project as a debunking of things I wanted to believe would work. Speed bursts, for example, are something I wanted to work. After all, I’ve often seen them recommended by players who can do speed well. And they appeared to offer quick results—remember, at only one month into this project, I could hit a burst at 184. Ultimately, however, I found speed bursts to be a dead end. They aren’t the same as a sustained fast scale. The feel for one simply doesn’t work for the other. I’m not saying speed bursts are useless. They’re great for tiny kernels of speed, and certainly they convinced me that I had the potential to succeed in learning to play fast scales. (By the way, that’s no small thing.) But for sustained scale passages, speed bursts just didn’t get me anywhere. So I dropped them, and had to find another path.

And thus I went, shedding ideas that didn’t pan out, as a snake sheds skins that no longer fit.

Having started a new path (again), I’d like to see preliminary evidence that it’s a promising path. And I believe I’ve found it. One thing became clear during the week: playing lightly made it easier to notice the internal tension that hinders my right hand speed. Subtle twinges of tension that flew below the radar when I played with greater force now stand out in sharper relief. Here’s a way to think of it. Imagine standing on a busy city sidewalk during rush hour. Within all the noise from cars, trucks, and people bustling about, imagine that somewhere close by is a cricket chirping. With all that ambient racket, you’re unlikely to hear the cricket. But now imagine you and the cricket are in a sealed and soundproof room. With all the distractions removed, the cricket is easy to hear. Playing lightly does something similar for me.

It’s too early to know whether this will pan out or is another dead end. I’ll stay with it for at least a few more weeks.

——[My next update will be April 1, 2012]——

Pianissimo Man

Things seemed to be creeping ahead for a while. Last week, working with the Mudarra Galliard scales, I was able to inch up the tempo day by day. One day a successful hit at 102, the next day a hit at 104, the next day a hit 105.

Then I hit a wall.

Two things in particular convinced me that I needed to try something different. The first was on March 7, when I had a good session going. I’d worked my way to 105 and had some good hits at that tempo. Then I got up to transfer a load of laundry from the washer to the dryer. This took no more than two minutes, but when I returned to the guitar my right hand speed was gone. What the hell? So I dropped all the way back to 80 and slowly worked my way back up. It took a good ten minutes to get back over 100.

I wasn’t pleased.

The second sobering episode happened the following Monday, March 12. It was just a bad day. I could get nowhere near 100, and spent the entire session trying to recapture what I’d done the previous week.

One of my criteria for good right hand speed is that it must be consistent. I don’t want a right hand that comes and goes. The two episodes described above just won’t do. If my right hand speed is unreliable, then I need to try something else.

I’ve decided to try something I’ve described before, but never really stuck with. For the rest of this month, maybe longer, I’m going to do my right hand alternation sessions at a very low volume level. The idea is this: when alternating in thin air, or merely tapping on a table top, my hand feels very light and relaxed, and I can easily hit a very fast tempo. On a guitar string, of course, this ease vanishes. But I need to gradually work the ease I feel away from the guitar into playing on a string.

This isn’t a new idea. I’ve brought it up before, and I’ve seen it recommended by other guitarists. But I’ve shied away from it for several reasons. The most obvious is that I don’t like the wimpy sound of playing lightly. But there’s another more important reason. I’ve found that playing lightly badly influences the control I have over my accuracy and tone.

Force and speed don’t get on well together. Each has its advantages. A more forceful stroke makes control easier. With enough force, the finger better controls the string rather than letting the string tension deflect the finger. On the other hand, a lighter stroke more easily produces speed. But the problem is that the advantage of each hinders the advantage of the other. Increase the force and you increase control, but at the cost of ease and speed—increase the ease and you increase speed, but at the cost of control.

Until now, I’ve leaned toward force. Not excessively so, mind you, but enough to control my accuracy and tone. That’s not surprising. After all, any classical guitarist worth his or her salt is always striving to control sound. Few of us are satisfied with speed without good sound.

(Some are, but let’s not go there.)

Now, however, I’m willing to go further toward a light touch, even if it means temporarily sacrificing accuracy and tone. I believe progress lies along a road that will feel wrong, at least for a while. It seems obvious that trying only what feels comfortable and correct won’t get me where I want to go, else I’d have gotten there already. Further, while I don’t want a wimpy sound, I do want to control speed at any volume, including pianissimo. By the way, I’ve noticed that many guitarists who can play fast scales can’t really vary the sound of their fast scales. Rarely do I hear a fast picado scale played pianissimo. Pianists, however, routinely play fast scales at every shade of volume. Perhaps this is a real world manifestation of the difficulty in controlling a light touch on the guitar.

So it’s piano, piano, and more piano for me. At least I won’t be disturbing the neighbors any time soon.

——[My next update will be March 25, 2012]——

Fighting the Hydra?

Last week’s post brought the following reply from a guitarist in Dallas:

There is nothing wrong with thinking about each of these things at some point, but to try to think of them all in one sitting doesn’t seem to work. The way the human brain interacts with the muscles should require little conscious thought. It’s like watching a poor free throw shooter vs. a good one, one looks awkward and forced while the other looks natural and relaxed.

Have you read Lee F. Ryan’s “The Natural Classical Guitar”? It is a great book on how to tackle the problems posed in learning to play. He stresses that it is easier to focus on a particular aspect at a given time. Often just the idea of being aware of the problem allows the mind and muscles to solve it on their own. Focus on one thing at a time for a few minutes. Say, play a short piece and focus on breathing, just being aware when you breath becomes labored or not rhythmic. Just thinking about it will allow you to adjust normally. Another time just think about feeling tension to find points on your body that are tense, if you find a tense spot you may have to make adjustments and think of a solution, but the key is to solve these problems one at a time.

Your conscious brain cannot think about all these things to direct your muscles in these tiny precise movements that happen in fractions of a second. You subconscious mind is remarkable at directing these movements. Don’t let your ego take control and say that your conscious brain can rule more of what you do. Since the whole idea for you is to play faster, this all becomes even more important. The over thinking is not the path to a better right hand. In fact is more likely to have the opposite effect, that’s why you have days when in your experiments that you seem to have these big setbacks, playing slower than the week before. I am not trying to belittle or discredit you Tom, but it seems you are trying to force your brain and body to do things that aren’t the natural way humans learn physical movement.

To answer this, I need to veer onto a side road for a moment.

A major problem with my blog is that it doesn’t begin to convey the full extent of what I’m doing. I spend one, maybe two hours writing each entry. I’m a slow writer, and some things I’d like to say elude my ability to describe them. So almost every time I write an entry, the next day I’m aware of what I left out or didn’t describe in enough detail. During my right hand project, I’m dealing with things that are hard to pin down in language, written or oral. Certainly I don’t see anyone doing much better in describing them. In fact, I seldom see any teacher or player even try to describe what I believe is central to making progress, at least for me.

I wish it were possible to clearly describe what I feel when I try to do fast rest stroke alternation. But thus far, I’m only able to describe symptoms rather than the thing itself. Breathing, for example, helps alert me to the thing itself, but it’s not the thing itself. And so it goes with the other symptoms I monitor as I practice. I’ve done this now long enough that the thing itself is very clear to me. But can I really describe the thing itself to another person? Apparently, so far I’m failing miserably.

I believe the right hand is harder to discuss than the left. Here’s an example. To alert a player to excess tension in the left hand, here’s a nifty little experiment. Fret a note with your left hand finger—any finger, fret, and string will do—and begin repeatedly sounding the note with your right hand. As you continue playing the note, gradually let up on your left hand finger until the note begins to buzz. Stop letting up on your left hand, but continue playing the note, with the buzzing. Now, as you continue to play the note, very slowly increase your left hand pressure until the buzzing stops and you get a clean note. Exactly at this point, stop increasing the pressure. You’ve just found exactly how much left hand pressure you need to get a clean note. Any extra pressure past the point where the buzzing stopped is excess pressure.

Notice how elegantly simple and effective this experiment is. Notice also how it’s perfectly tailored to whoever is doing it, regardless of physical differences between players. This exercise even tailors itself to different guitars or strings. Any person playing any guitar on any kind of strings will automatically get a perfectly accurate feel for how much pressure he or she must use when stopping a note with the left hand.

What I particularly love about this experiment is that, for it to work, one doesn’t have to be sensitive to excess tension. And that’s the crux of the matter. To be useful, an experiment like this must alert a player to excess tension even if he or she is oblivious to it. In the experiment I’ve just described, the buzzing—something so obvious that anyone can notice it—alerts the player to the insufficient pressure. And at the instant the buzzing ceases as the player gradually increases pressure, no additional pressure is needed. The player who’s oblivious to excess tension can now begin to see the folly of pressing harder after the buzzing stopped. What begins as sensitivity to buzzing now has a chance of evolving into a deeper sensitivity to the thing itself: excess tension.

I love this little experiment. Try as I might, I can’t think of anything that works as well for the right hand. If anyone can suggest something, I’d like to hear it.

Now to more directly answer the quote with which I began this post. It may appear that I’m trying to juggle too many things at once when I’m running repetitions. But I don’t see it that way. All the things I monitor as I play—breathing, jaw clenching, right hand thumb placement, a finger rigidity, et cetera—are manifestations of one thing: excess tension. I’m now so familiar with this that I see it as a single thing, even though it might throw off a constellation of symptoms. At bottom, all those symptoms point to one thing and one thing only.

So I’m not fighting the Hydra. Or if I am, I won’t be distracted by the wrong targets. My opponent has many heads, but one heart. As long as I aim for the heart, I’m on the right track.

By the way, I own and have read the Ryan book. I like it.

——[My next update will be March 18, 2012]——

Everything Matters

This was an intense week of practice. I’m doing fewer repetitions during each practice session, but I’m far more explicit in what I think about with each repetition. My reasoning is thus: there’s little point in running repetitions if I’m not precise about my goals. Remember, I’m trying to do something I’ve never done before. So if I run on auto-pilot during repetitions, I’m merely doing what I already can’t do. That’s counterproductive. Instead, I want to reinforce things that will bring me closer to my goal.

The more I do this, the more I realize that every little thing matters. Nothing, and I mean nothing, can be left unexamined. I must cast a suspicious eye on everything I do as a player.

Consider the compressed Galliard I’ve been working with:


Here’s what I think about on each repetition. On this part:


...I strive to be exquisitely precise as I cross from one string to the next. As I finish the last note on one string, my finger must line up perfectly for the first note of the next string. It can’t be halfway between one string and the next. Rather, it should be perfectly set for the new string. There’s a feel to this that’s hard to describe—I think of it as being “into the string” on each note. I know that’s a vague description for someone trying to understand what I mean, but it means something specific to me. I strive for that feeling on every repetition. On the quarter note at the end of the measure I consciously relax my hand.

On this part:


...immediately after playing the bass note, my thumb sits down between the fifth and sixth strings. I do this for two reasons: it damps the fifth string (and any sympathetic vibration of the sixth string), and it steadies my hand for the following sixteenth notes. On the dotted eighth I consciously relax my hand. For the sixteenth notes I dig in a bit for both musical and technical reasons. I want this scale to sound aggressive, and again I want to get that “into the string” feel. As in the previous measure, I consciously relax my hand on the quarter note at the end of the measure.

On this part:


...I consciously relax my hand at each eighth note. I also consciously relax during the upward shift, being careful to not allow any residual nervousness about a long shift to make me tense. (I’ve found that even a simple long shift can dredge up an unconscious, almost atavistic tension.) Throughout this entire part, my right hand thumb is carefully choreographed:
• Immediately after playing the half note D, my thumb prepares on the fifth string.
• Immediately after playing the tied quarter notes A, my thumb prepares on the sixth string.
• Immediately after playing the G, my thumb prepares on the fifth string.
• Immediately after playing the last quarter note A, my thumb prepares on the fourth string.
• After playing the tied dotted half D, my thumb sits between the fifth and sixth string. As before, this damps both strings and steadies my hand.
• As my fingers approach the third string note, my thumb comes off the strings and stays off for the remainder of this passage. This allows my hand an unimpeded crossing on the lower strings.

Throughout this long passage, I’m alert to whatever tension creeps in as I play. Do my shoulders tense? Do I clench my jaw? Does my a finger become rigid? Does my breathing become irregular? If any of these things creep in, I try to dissipate them as I play.

•                              •                              •

Let me be clear about what I’m trying to accomplish through this nit-picking. By no means do I want to think like this for the rest of my life every time I play a fast scale. Rather, my goal is think this way on every repetition until this level of detail becomes a reflex. At some point, all this will become automatic. But for it to become automatic, I must for now concentrate on thinking about these things on every repetition. Merely repeating a scale passage absent-mindedly does no good. Doing that, I’ll merely reinforce what’s never worked for me. To ingrain a better way of playing, I must hold a specific ideal in mind until it becomes my normal playing.

I’m sometimes told that I think too much—just let go and play. I don’t buy it. If I can’t play the way I want to play, then I can’t wait for the Good Technique Fairy to sprinkle magic dust on my head. I have to painstakingly rebuild my technique bit by bit.

This reminds me of an old philosophical paradox:

“What if nothing matters? Or worse, what if everything matters?”

To a nihilist, perhaps, nothing matters. But to a good musician, everything matters. It’s not easy, which may explain why, in a world full of guitarists, relatively few of us are virtuosos.

——[My next update will be March 11, 2012]——