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]——

February 25 Video Update

This was the week I decided to get something above 90 on video. Monday was a day off from work, and I decided to make a video of the Mudarra Galliard. That morning during my right hand practice session, I’d hit the Galliard at 92. So that afternoon I set up the camera and warmed up on the guitar. Then I’d run a few takes, pick the best one, and upload it. Piece of cake.

I turned on the camera and played for about ten minutes. When I thought I had some good takes, I got up to turn off the camera. It was then that I noticed it wasn’t recording. Dammit! Examining the camera, I found it had recorded for a few minutes, then shut itself off. Did I have too many old files cluttering up the memory disk? Thinking this was the problem, I deleted every old file I could find. Then I started again. Looking up at the camera between takes, I found it again had shut itself off after a few minutes.

Great. Now I apparently had a defective camera that would run for only a few minutes. I again deleted the recording I’d made—there was nothing good enough to keep—and started over. I began running through the Galliard knowing that the camera would stay on for only two or three takes. This made me edgy. My playing devolved as my anger increased. Finally I gave up. It wasn’t going to happen on this particular day. I broke down the camera gear and put away my guitar. To cool down, I took a walk.

Mulling this fiasco as I walked, I saw that I’d let my emotions sabotage my playing. I couldn’t allow this to continue. To develop a consistent technique, I needed to better control my reactions to bad circumstances. After all, concert artists constantly have to deal with less than perfect situations: bad halls, noisy audiences, broken nails, strings that refuse to stay in tune, et cetera. The best artists make the best of it and play well. The bad ones pitch a fit and play badly. While I’m no concert artist, I’d like to model myself on what the best concert artists do. And I don’t want the quality of my technique to depend on however I happen to feel at the moment.

Tuesday, I took another crack at making a video. Knowing the camera would give me only a short window of opportunity, I decided to run takes of the scale section of the Galliard. I wasn’t yet ready to hold my emotions in check for the entire Galliard, so I’d leave that for another day.

The result of this session is on the video below. The first take on the video is at a metronome setting of 92—the second take is at 94. I did five takes at 92, which explains why you’ll see me say “that was five” on the video. The fifth take wasn’t the best, but it was right before the good take at 94, and that’s why I used it.

My next goal is obvious: get the entire Galliard on video, preferably at my target tempo of 100. I’m working on it.

By the way, there’s nothing wrong with my camera. Turns out it had a lot of old files that didn’t show up on the camera display, but did show when I hooked it up to my computer. I deleted the old files. So the next time I try to get a good performance on video, I’ll have more than a few minutes to get it. That should improve both the quality of my playing and my blood pressure.

——[My next update will be March 4, 2012]——

In Praise of the Metronome

My alternation in the 80’s seems well established, so I’m gunning for the 90’s, with an occasional foray into the 100’s. At the end of this month I’d like to have a video of the Mudarra Galliard at 92. But getting this on camera will be like trying to catch a glimpse of the Lock Ness Monster. To get it on video, I’ll likely need to do many takes. I’ve considered doing some of my morning practice sessions in front of the camera. Then if lightning strikes, it’ll be on camera.

Technical progress is a shape-shifting thing. It often comes in stages. First, I can’t do it at all. Then I begin work, barely knowing exactly what I’m doing, but trying things I’ve been told by others. If I’m lucky, there comes a brief flash when I almost do it—of course it flits away immediately, but now I’ve the tiniest window into the correct feel of what I’m trying to do. That encourages me, and I soldier on. Next, I get to where I can do it, but not consistently, and certainly not in front of an audience. Again, I soldier on. In time and with a lot of hard work, I have in hand something that moves me forward as a player.

None of these stages are clearly discrete from one another. In fact, there’s seldom an “eureka” moment when I obviously cross from can’t to can. Rather, it’s more like one day I stop and say: “Wait a minute, didn’t this used to be impossible for me?”

As I run repetitions above 80, I’m more and more trying to simulate a performance mindset. Rather than endlessly running repetitions one after the other, I’m treating each repetition as an individual performance. I’m trying to recreate the “one and done” reality of guitar playing. A technique that crumbles under pressure is worthless. So it’s time to ratchet up the pressure.

I’ve also begun adding a modest collection of right hand studies at the end of each session. Brouwer’s Nos. 6 and 7 from Estudios Sencillos make an appearance, 6 for arpeggios, and 7 for string crossing. (I also like 7 for its weirdness—it sounds like music from another planet.) A couple of Giuliani studies are in there, and also Carcassi’s Op. 60 No. 7. And sometimes I top it off with Villa-Lobos Etude 1 and the Carulli Fandango.

I’d like to close with a defense of the much maligned metronome. From time to time during my project I’ve been advised to ditch the metronome. I find such advice odd, particularly coming from musicians, and especially coming from guitarists. There often appears a fundamental misunderstanding of what the real value of a metronome is for a practicing musician.

First, I’d like to dispense with an argument I’ve seen repeatedly. It’s illustrated by the following exchange, where I wrote:

“Really, there’s no fundamental difference between keeping up with an orchestra and keeping up with a metronome.”

...which prompted this reply:

“There is a fundamental difference, otherwise we would be happy with computers playing everything without those annoying mistakes humans make in live performances. The metronome may have a pulse but it doesn’t breathe.”

Try as I might, I can’t understand why someone thinks any musician needs to be told this. Yes, the metronome is inflexible. That’s not a secret—everyone who uses a metronome knows it. To tell a musician that a metronome is inflexible is tantamount to saying that you’re talking to an idiot who can’t tell the difference between a tempo set by a living orchestra and a tempo tapped out by a machine. That may be so. But isn’t it more charitable to assume that the musician you’re talking to perhaps has something less idiotic in mind?

Which brings me to my main defense of the metronome. I don’t see the metronome as something that teaches me how to keep a steady tempo. It may, but that’s not its real value. Its real value is that it trains me to be objective about my playing. Rather than relying on my internal and subjective sense of tempo, the metronome forces me to attend to something outside myself. I must match my playing to something that cares not a whit for my problems in executing a particular passage or technique. Either I can do it, or I can’t. The metronome immediately tells me. There’s no negotiating, begging, or wheedling with it. And that’s what I mean when I say there’s no fundamental difference between keeping up with an orchestra and keeping up with a metronome.

Speaking of the metronome, I once attended a performance of György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique. For those unfamiliar with it, this is a piece in which 100 wind-up metronomes are set a-going. The piece ends when the last metronome stops. While I might quibble with its definition as a musical work, I must admit it was an oddly mesmeric spectacle. I also recall that some in the audience were taking bets on which metronome would be the last to run down. In my opinion, Ligeti missed a potentially lucrative opportunity to exploit this aspect of his composition.

——[My next update will be February 26, 2012]——

Believing Is Halfway to Doing

This has been another good week. On the Mudarra Galliard, I’ve been hitting 80 pretty reliably. On Thursday I hit it cleanly at 92, something I’ve never done before. Whether I can hit it under pressure is debatable. I’ll try to get it on camera at 92 by the beginning of March. So 2012 is being good to me so far. Maybe even numbered years are my friends.

I wouldn’t say that 2011 was a total washout. If nothing else, it’s made me intimately familiar with the tension that inhibits my right hand speed. Indeed, on any given day I can pinpoint exactly where the cutoff is that delineates my relaxed hand from my tense hand. This week, for example, 80 was no problem for my right hand rest stroke alternation. I felt relaxed, and my playing was clean and accurate. At 84, I could still manage it, but I could feel the tension beginning to brew along my shoulders and creeping up my arm. At 88, the tension hit the tipping point to where I could no more reliably do alternation. On any given day, these numbers can vary. But this is now how precisely I can gauge what I can do.

Counter-intuitive as it may be, this is a good thing. I can’t change what I don’t know. If this tension went unnoticed, I’d be hard-pressed to work at eliminating it. But now I know it well. And knowing it, I’m well on the road to resolving it.

With a foothold on 80 well in hand, I’m now aiming for the 90’s. I’ve noticed that when I try alternation at 92, the 80’s seem easier, even if my try at 92 didn’t go well. It’s all part of my determination to expect success. Call it the Tinkerbell Theory: to fly, I must believe. Certainly there’s nothing gained by pessimism. If I don’t believe I can do something, then I’m already halfway to not doing it.

This week I got a telling demonstration of how attitude influences technique. While running the Galliard at 92, I had a brief lapse of concentration and botched the left hand fingering halfway through an extended scale passage. While the botch was brief, it triggered a flash of anger—with that anger my hand, which until then had felt reasonably relaxed, suddenly tensed up and butchered the rest of the passage. Stopping for a moment, I made a mental note to heed the lesson my body was trying to teach me. Overreacting to mistakes inhibits technique.

So grow up and stop pitching a fit whenever something goes wrong.

——[My next update will be February 19, 2012]——

Practicing Under the Drill

This was a surprisingly good week. First, I was able to pretty consistently hit the Mudarra Galliard scales in the 80’s. More importantly, I cracked 90 with a few good performances.

Part of the reason, I think, is that I’ve started to attack my lengthy warmup problem. As I’ve reported in the past, it takes far too long to get my right hand up to speed. So I’ve begun each session this week by trying to get my alternation speed up to 80 within ten minutes. I’ve long suspected that much of what we attribute to a need to warm up is actually more psychological than physical. In other words, instead of a physical warm up, I need to be quicker and more deliberate about snapping my concentration into focus.

Some years ago I got a glimpse into how quickly a concert artist can shift into performance mode. Before Jason Vieaux became as busy as he is now, I sometimes played duet gigs with him. One of these gigs was a summer outdoor party. Because we were background music and no one was paying close attention to us, Vieaux would occasionally cut loose and improvise rather than follow what was written in his part. Doing so, he’d sometimes flub a note or two—nothing horrible, but flubs nonetheless. After finishing one piece, he’d apparently flubbed one note too many. I heard him mutter to himself “okay, stop fooling around.” As we began the next piece, it was like he’d flipped a switch and gone into full-bore concert artist mode. Every note was clean, and every rhythm was crystalline. I recall thinking that this is what it’s like to play alongside a world class concert artist. (I also recall thinking that I’d damned well better keep up.)

Clearly, attitude is half the battle. So part of my practice sessions are now devoted to improving my attitude toward speed. Rather than viewing speed as a far-off goal, I’m instead cultivating the mindset that I fully expect to do this, and also that it shouldn’t take long to warm up my right hand. This by itself seems to be paying off right away. I’ll keep at it.

In keeping with my goal to change myself, I’m now experimenting with relaxation in situations other than guitar playing. This week I had two visits to the dentist. When the drill is bearing down into my back molar, my tendency is to white-knuckle my way through the experience. What better time, I thought, to practice consciously relaxing myself. While my success in doing this varied—I’m not intrinsically stoic—it’s in keeping with my gradually increasing certainty that all is one. What I do without the guitar influences what I do with it.

Yes, one can improve one’s guitar playing even while cowering in a dentist chair.

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