Moving On

No, I’m still not dead.

I’ve found a new project. My goal now is to make a full length CD. This is merely for my own pleasure. I’m not getting any younger. Someday when I can no longer play, I’d like to listen to a recording of myself when I still could play and fondly reminisce about the good old days. As for now, these are the good old days.

I’ve pried open my wallet to buy some decent recording equipment. If you’re curious, you can see it here. So far I have two pieces recorded. Since I’m slow to learn new pieces, this will take a while to finish.

This also dovetails nicely with my old right hand project. The pieces I’ll be recording sometimes challenge my right hand speed. In the piece I just recorded, for example, the right hand arpeggios pushed the outer limit of my ability. (You’ll hear them at the 3:25 mark of the video below.) Thus, my quest to improve my right hand isn’t entirely aborted. It’s simply taken a backseat to something more enjoyable.

Here’s one of the pieces I’ve recorded so far. It’s the first movement of Giuliani’s Op. 15. One movement down, two to go. Hope you enjoy it. And be assured that failure in one project doesn’t preclude starting—and enjoying—another.

Failure and Beyond

I’ve failed.

There, I said it. And I don’t like it. But it is what it is.

I’m moving on to other things. Currently, I’m trying to learn one piece in which I do everything as perfectly as I can. No cutting corners, and no settling for “close enough.” I want to play the piece exactly as I hear it in my head. And when I get there, I plan to make a recording and write up a detailed study guide for the piece. So that’s my new project.

By the way, I’m surprised to find that I also have a left hand. Who knew?

Perhaps all isn’t lost in my quest for right hand speed. But it’s clear my problems are too fundamental to be solved piecemeal. Rather, I must begin at the beginning, and that’s where my new project starts. By rebuilding my playing bit by bit, I may actually improve my right hand speed. I’m simply not focusing solely on speed. I just want to get back to learning and playing music. My right hand will either improve or it won’t.

Nonetheless, “Building A Better Right Hand” shouldn’t fizzle out with no ending. It needs an epilog. Below is a brief summary of what I feel are the most important posts of this blog. Others might pick up the baton and take it farther. I hope my experience helps.

These first two posts I regard as the most important things I learned during my project:

The Brass Tacks of Technique
As early as, possible, every guitar student should be taught something like this.

Training the Musical Pooch
An overview of how to cultivate speed.

These next five posts touch on concepts important to developing a relaxed technique:

Calibrating Tension
Pianissimo Man
Light Speed
The importance of gradually parsing tension when building speed.

Rethinking Speed Bursts
Speed bursts are often recommended as a way of developing speed. Maybe they shouldn’t.

The Nitty-Gritty
A discussion of “micro-breaks.”

The irony of thinking I have something to say about speed when I can’t do speed isn’t lost on me. But in finding a worthwhile approach, attention must be paid to those who can’t do speed. After all, who better is there to define the dimensions of the problem? Those who can often don’t adequately fathom those who can’t. If nothing else, my experience may point to a better way.

Progress is often built on the wreckage of failure. I’ll never be the statue. But there’s something to being the pedestal.

Rising from the Ashes

No, I’m not dead, although you might be forgiven for thinking so. My last post was November 18, 2012. Shortly thereafter, I became frustrated with my lack of progress. So I threw up my hands—both left and right—and quit.

Nonetheless, from time to time I’d experiment with i and m alternation. Usually the results were dismal and didn’t inspire me to continue. But lately I’ve been at it again. The results are more encouraging.

I’ve no desire to repeat myself, as I felt I was doing toward the end of this blog. So I’ll quietly continue working at it. If I get anywhere, I’ll report the results.

“M”

I’m stuck short of 100. And the problem, I’m convinced, is m. That’s no surprise. Way back when I began this project, I complained about m in only the third post of this blog. But now, a year and ten months later, it’s time to attack the problem more directly.

The problem, as I see it, is that m automatically tenses whenever it has to move fast. I notice this particularly at the tip joint, which flexes in a bit when I play fast. It likely also tenses at slower speeds, though it’s harder to notice. To counter this, I’m starting with a lot of slow rest strokes with m, consciously allowing the tip to give as it plays through the string.

By the way, there’s apparently some controversy over whether the tip joint should give as it sounds a string. (One of my former teachers was castigated in some quarters for suggesting this in one of his early guitar methods.) But it’s no longer controversial to me. I now believe a flexible tip joint is one key to avoiding excess tension in the right hand. This is a reversal from what I believed a little over a decade ago. So be it.

One exercise I’m trying is the following:




While m only is playing the first string, i is planted on the second string. As I play the first measure, I consciously allow the tip of m to give—it should feel as though m is gliding over the string. I want no sense that m is gripping the string as it plays. I then try to maintain this feel in the second measure.

I’m also giving myself as much work as I can manage with m only. Even when teaching, if I’m playing something with a student, I’ll play m only whenever possible. I’m taking the attitude of young aspiring basketball players who are trying to improve their ball handling skills: if they have a weaker hand in dribbling, then they’ll dribble endlessly with it until it improves to the same level as their stronger hand.

I’m also taking another look at the Alexander Technique. The reason for this happened during a lesson last week. A beginning student had arrived a bit late for a lesson. I was in a hurry to get his guitar tuned so we could get on with the lesson. As I tuned a string, I accidentally overshot the correct pitch. Immediately I felt a slight jolt of tension in my body. It was infinitesimally small—two years ago I’d probably never notice it. But I’m far more sensitive to tension now than I was before I began this project. And there it was. Thinking about it afterward, it amazed me at how little it took to make me tense. (I was tuning up, for crying out loud.) Yet there it was. And this got me to thinking about the Alexander Technique idea of inhibition.

Mind you, I’m skeptical of the Alexander Technique. Much of my skepticism has to do with its practitioners. Here’s an example. Some years ago when I was a student at the North Carolina School of the Arts, an Alexander Technique teacher gave a presentation to the students. Much of it seemed mumbo-jumbo to me, but I was determined to listen with an open mind. At one point, a student who was clearly skeptical asked a pointed but sensible question. Smoothly, the Alexander Technique teacher picked up a model of a human skull and tossed it to the questioner—as he did so, he said “you can answer your question by looking at this.” Surprised, the student who asked the question caught the model skull. The teacher then ignored him and went on with his presentation as though nothing had happened. I watched the student who’d asked the question. He stood holding the model skull with a “what the Hell?” look on his face.

It was at that moment that I lost interest in the rest of the presentation. Clearly this teacher was more skilled at deflecting questions than answering them. I was particularly turned off by his passive-aggressive response to a critical question. He literally threw something at the questioner. Of course, he made the throw in a polite and safe underhanded toss. But the underlying message was clear: don’t mess with me.

Further, in reading about the Alexander Technique, I’ve often gotten the same feeling of smoke and mirrors opacity I encounter with pseudo-sciences like acupuncture and chiropractic. But perhaps the Alexander Technique itself is a useful thing that’s being twisted by the follies of some followers. Whenever something works, it runs the danger of being franchised by mediocrities who flock to it as a lucrative business. The good it offered gets buried under a slagheap of miraculous claims, far from what it was in the hands of its originator.

So I’ll look into it again.

——[My next post will be on November 26, 2012.]——

Missed It By That Much

I wanted to do it. It was so tantalizingly close. I could almost reach out and touch it. But it wasn’t to be. At least not yet.

I really thought I could get a performance of the Mudarra Galliard on video at 100. A nagging cold slowed me down. (Which is why I didn’t post last weekend. Sorry.) But early in the week there were brief moments when my hand felt good at 100. On Thursday I was so optimistic that I set up the video equipment and finished my practice session with the camera rolling. All I got were a lot of botched takes and some creative cursing. Figuring my right hand was camera shy, Friday I tried running audio only takes. Still nothing.

I’ve noticed over time that there’s an iron law of progression I can’t avoid. First, I catch a glimpse of something getting better, but only alone in the practice room and only for a few seconds. Then, slowly, the improvement gets more consistent and reliable, but still only in the practice room. If I try to show it to anyone, it disappears. After much painstaking work, I can then show it to one or two people. But God forbid that I should try to put it on stage in front of an audience. In time, however, even that barrier will fall.

Which leads me to the mantra that sustains me through each flicker of hope:

      If I can do it once, I should be able to do it twice.

      If I can do it twice, I should be able to do it thrice.

      If I can do it thrice, I should be able to do it consistently.

      If I can do it consistently, I should be able to do it in front of an audience.

      If I can do it consistently in front of an audience, I’ve got it.

      And on to the next problem.

You can hear where I am now on this audio sample. The tempo is 100, and you’ll find it’s neither clean nor rhythmically secure. But I sense I’m close to cleaning it up. (No, really I am. Seriously. Why are you looking at me like that?) I’m now very familiar with the physical tension that creeps in whenever I try this piece over 90. There are moments in my practice sessions where I’m able to keep the tension at bay just long enough for one good rep. I just haven’t gotten it on a recording yet. With patience and careful monitoring of the tension, I believe I can clear this hurdle.

So my goal is to get a clean performance of the Mudarra Galliard at 100 on camera by the end of November. Wish me luck.

——[My next update will be November 12, 2012]——

Slow Practice Ain’t Chicken Soup

As a guitar teacher, I could save myself a lot of breath by having “slow down” tattooed on my forehead. It’s possibly the most common thing music teachers say to their students. And rightfully so. Humans are wired to run when threatened, and nothing is so reliably threatening as a difficult passage that students try to bulldoze their way through. So “slow down” has a venerable place in music instruction.

By itself, however, “slow down” doesn’t tell us much. When we’re doing something wrong, slowing down is only part of the solution. What then do we do when we slow down? If we don’t know, we might keep doing the wrong thing we did when playing faster. We’ll just do it slower. So now we can more calmly and methodically ingrain the thing we’re doing—the wrong thing, that is.

Throughout this project, I’ve dutifully genuflected at the altar of slow practice. But absent the right idea of what I should be doing, it got me precisely nowhere. And that goes for every other strategy related to slowing down. Breaking down passages into smaller bits? Been there, done that. Adding one note at a time to a scale passage? Done it. Practice dotted rhythms? Check. Increase tempos one click at a time with the metronome? Snap notes with a sharp staccato? Kick my fingers like miniature Rockettes? Check, check, and check.

It’s all worthless without the correct aim. For learning right hand speed, this aim must be a carefully calibrated understanding and increasing control of internal tension. If I’m not learning to recognize and control internal tension, then slow practice goes nowhere slowly.

Mind you, slow practice will still be an essential part of my teaching and my own practice. Knowing what I’m trying to achieve, slow practice is still the best approach in the early stages of learning something new. But now I’m less apt to dwell in the land of slow. And I’m less apt to tell students to slow down. Rather, it’s better to tell them specifically what they’re doing wrong, and how they could do it better. Then they can practice in a new and more productive way.

Slowly, of course.

——[My next update will be October 29, 2012]——

A Bad Week Gets Better

Short post this week. My new goal is to record the Mudarra Galliard at a metronome setting of 100. (For my taste, this is a good performance tempo.) It became my new short term goal after a disturbing incident last week. While practicing a six string descending scale, I found I could hit 120 with fair consistency. So I decided to try hitting scales in the context of an actual piece of music. Dusting off the Galliard—which I’d previously worked on for months—I found I could barely hit the scales at anything above 80. Yet going back to the six string descending scale, I could still hit it at 120.

Needless to say, this sparked a minor temper tantrum.

After I calmed down, I began working the problem. (If nothing else, this project has forced me to learn patience.) Two days later, I was consistently hitting the first scale of the Galliard at 100. What particularly encouraged me was how good it felt. My hand rippled through the scale like it was nothing. And the sound was that silky smooth rest stroke sound I love so well. Of course, the long scales at the end of the Galliard aren’t there yet. But hey, that gives me a reason to get up in the morning to practice.

Later that day I worked with a student on the Courante from BWV 996. He’d watched the Jason Vieaux video lesson on this piece, and wanted to know how Vieaux had done a particular cross string trill. After figuring it out, I demonstrated the trill to my student. Happily, my right hand was still working well that day, and the trill rolled trippingly off my fingers. “Hey, look at me, I’m Jason Vieaux!” I exclaimed.

So the week began badly but ended well. And now it’s the Galliard at 100 or bust. Next week I’ll delve into this in more detail.

——[My next update will be October 22, 2012]——