Short But Sweet - Pitstop Practicing

OK, so last time I waxed lyrical about the importance of committing oneself to a regular and structured practice session – and make no mistake, that is the best way to ensure progress on the instrument (any instrument). But we live in a hectic, chaotic 24/7 world where there's always something competing for our attention, and that can mean that a structured practice routine is simply impossible to adhere to. That in turn becomes a demotivational force, as the student feels himself slipping further and further behind schedule. Inevitably the temptation grows to simply jack the whole the thing in.

So, what's the alternative? Well, I always stress the idea of little and often in practice sessions. 10-15 minutes each day will prove a whole lot more valuable than trying to crank in a three-hour marathon at the weekend.

A lot of players get intimidated by the idea of having to get the guitar out, tune it, set up the amp and practice rig- when you're pushed for time, all this seems like something of a mountain to climb. So the answer is to have the guitar always there, always ready, always to hand. Don't pakc it away in it's case, keep it out on a stand in the living room, in the dining room. Don't worry about setting up a practice rig, just play acoustically (a neat trick is to press the headstock against a large piece of wooden furniture like a coffee table or book case – the extra mass of wood serves as a makeshift amplifier). Use the metronome in your head, or any of the excellent guitar apps available for your phone. Don't make playing the guitar an occasion you have to get ready for, make it something you do naturally.

What to practice? Well, you can make progress in just two or three minutes if you focus on the trouble spots. Rhythm and timing is always something that any guitar player can work on – a great (and simple) exercise is to simply play muted strings to pick up the rhythm and improve your sense of pulse. This translates to a much more solid foundation for anything else you want to play.

Let's also not forget simple mechanics – usually the co-ordination between fingers 3 and 4 is the weakest, so a simple finger pair exercise is a useful thing to warm up and practice a weak spot. Learning a song? Struggling with a specific chord change? Focus on just that change. Set yourself a stopwatch and hammer that one chord change until your fingers accept it and it's no longer a problem. Brief, focused bursts on problem areas can bring real results quickly.

Want to keep motivated? Go back and try old material that you used to struggle with. It's a great feeling tackling a song that's proved out of reach in the past and being able to grab it by the scruff of the neck.

So, even if you can't commit to a regular and scheduled practice routine, if trying to commit is causing you stress and sapping your enjoyment... then this is the alternative. Dive in, grab a couple of minutes of focused, “burst” practice when you can over the day, and you will find you make improvement. Don't let the guitar become another chore – let's face it, life throws us all plenty of them. Guitar is what we reward ourselves with when they're all done.

Training vs Teaching

Blimey, March already? At this rate I'm going to have to get everyone started on their Christmas compositions before long..

Now, in my last post I mentioned the aspect of training your fingers in the same way that an athlete trains their muscles, and I'd like to try and expand on that a little this month and talk about the difference as I see it between teaching and training.

Teaching is all about introducing the student to new concepts, and helping them to understand those concepts by connecting them to information the student already knows. Whether that be a new chord shape, or a theory idea or a scale pattern – teaching is all about imparting that information to the conscious, rational part of the brain, ensuring that the rationale behind the new idea is understood and makes sense.

Training, on the other hand, is all about finessing those movements via repetition and attention to form, until the student is able to call upon these responses instinctively. Using the same athletics parallel we looked at last month, this is similar to a training session in the gym – you may not necessarily learn any new exercises you didn't know before, but by repetition and attention to the detail of what you're doing, you're able to make incremental improvements simply by gradual progressive steps. For example, playing the same scale sequence, but 1-2 bpm quicker, or with a slightly more defined dynamic difference between piano and forte, or just playing the same notes with increased clarity as the pick and fret hands learn better how to mute out unwanted string noise.

Many psychologists view the brain on two levels – system 1, the rational conscious part of our brain that considers things logically and in depth, and system 2, which is the intuitive “subconscious” part of the mind. Both parts are necessary – can you imagine, for example, all the decisions that have to be taken in order to take a breath, or blink an eye? Without the intuitive system 2 which lets us “just do it”, we'd never be able to cope.

Teaching places the information we need in system 1. But without the training aspect, the understanding and the movements we need will never make it into the instinctive system 2 part which allows us to immediately call upon the licks, phrases, scale patterns that we need to improvise in the heat of the moment. Training groups these ideas together into system 2 which allows us to call on them much more quickly, without consciously thinking (often referred to as “muscle memory”).

There are many everyday examples of this duality in action – driving, for example. The processes all have to be learned painstakingly at first, but with experience and practice – training – they become grouped together in the instinctive realm of system 2. An example I use with my students – I have no idea how to to my shoelaces. I just tie them. If I stop to think about it – can't do it. For the first time in a good long while, one of my schools started requiring their peripatetic teachers to wear a tie. I haven't worn a tie in many, many years.. the movements were there, buried deep in system 2, but in order to access them I had to focus my conscious mind on something else completely and do it without thinking about it – effectively taking my own brain by surprise!

Of course, this makes it extremely important that at the first stages of training your fingers to accept new movements, chord shapes etc., you have to pay very close attention to training the right thing into your fingers. Otherwise all you practice is playing badly, and all you will get better at is playing badly. So 10-15 minutes spent focusing intently on your playing can have far greater impact than four hours splitting concentration between guitar and computer, guitar and TV, guitar and Xbox...   

Feel The Burn - A Need For Speed!

As some of you are aware, this year I'm studying for my LLCM diploma in teaching, and as part of the written element of the course, applicants are required to analyse the styles of three prominent electric guitarists. I've chosen Zakk Wylde amongst others, as he's long been a hero of mine due to his brutal, take-no-prisoners playing style – no fancy tapping or sweeping, no poncy exotic scales, just minor pentatonic, furious alternate picking and vibrato performed with the kind of ferocity that could choke a tiger.

Now Zakk's other big passion in life is weightlifting, and it occurs to me as I researched a little deeper that the the one can influence the other. Lifters take a variety of approaches to reach peak strength just as guitar players do to reach and improve peak speed and accuracy. Lifting coaches (yes, I've read up on this) talk about three types of strength – maximum strength, endurance strength and explosive strength, and we can relate this to speed when playing guitar (for convenience's sake, when I talk about speed, I include accuracy as a given – speed without accuracy is just noise, lots of wrong notes played fast is worth far less than one single right note played slowly).

So - Maximum strength for lifters = maximum speed for guitar players.

This can be developed by focusing on two separate paths. Explosive or burst speed and endurance speed. Let's use the spider exercise as a simple example. Suppose your maximum “safe” speed – i.e. with no wrong notes, no notes fluffed and hands perfectly synchronised – is sixteenth notes at 120bpm. If 120 bpm is the fastest you can do it, it will stay the fastest you can do it until you've learned to think and play more quickly. Sitting on 120bpm for multiple repetitions will build solid endurance technique, helping you to get better playing the exercise at that speed – no amount of repetition alone will help you get quicker. For that, we'll need to push the boundaries.

Play the exercise for thirty seconds or so continuously at your maximum safe speed. Then crank the tempo up by 5-10 bpm and just for a few repetitions play absolutely flat out, keeping the speedup even if you fluff some of the notes. This is explosive or burst speed.Then, before exhaustion or cramps set in, return the metronome, this time to 121bpm – just 1 bpm higher than your original safe endurance speed. Having trained your fingers briefly to push past their natural maximum, it's now easier to play at this new maximum speed.

This type of practicing builds speed very quickly – for example, play the same exercise every day for a week, and theoretically you will gain an extra 7bpm maximum speed. Within a month you could be looking at a gain of 30bpm! In practice, gains will likely be smaller as the faster you get, the more difficult it becomes to add speed (the law of diminishing returns), but it is a great way of significantly improving your maximum speed and accuracy. Practice using small scale fragments and patterns to begin with before branching out into longer ideas, and always remember to respect your fingers - “no pain, no gain” does NOT work with guitar playing!

The Big Xmas Idea 2013 - Song(s) For Syria

Okay folks, listen up - we have a mission to perform.

So, the idea I had (helpfully, back in December 2012, waaaaaay too late to really do anything about it...) was to have all my students collaborate on writing a Christmas song, which we would then release over iTunes, knock Simon Cowell's puppets off the top spot in the charts and raise a ton of money for a worthy cause - in this case, Syrian refugees caught in the horrific civil war that's been raging there since 2011.

This (like alot of my bright ideas...) has now mushroomed into looking like a full album's worth of music as my students are taking to this with great enthusiasm, and courtesy of BBC Radio Leicester's Tony Wadswoth, I've had a chance to plug it on the air too, so here's a breakdown of exactly what's going on for those interested:

Everyone who wants to get involved has the option of a) composing an entire song themselves (less daunting than you might think), b) collaborating with another student to write a song together, or c) contributing a guitar, bass or keyboard part to someone else's track, almost like a session player.

All these songs will be arranged here and recorded to a click track, before being whizzed over to my good friend Steve Ward's drum teaching studio in Loughborough (http://www.instrumental-music.co.uk) to have him and his students record drum parts.

Vocals can be handled by the students themselves, or for those who prefer not to sing, Matt from the quasi-legendary Dave The Rock Band (http://www.thedave.co.uk) has ensnared the services of VocalTech in Leicester, including the provision of a choir.

All songs will then be mixed down and mastered before being uploaded to iTunes and distributed digitally.

This is going to be a steep learning curve for all concerned, so there's every chance that things won't go exactly to plan, but as musicians we'll just do what we do best and IMPROVISE!

Already we've got a couple of compositions coming along nicely, so if you'd like to get involved in this, join us on http://www.facebook.com/JMGuitarTuition, - so far it's been a ton of fun and just maybe we can do a little bit of good in the world this year.

All we need now is a name.....

Dealing With Nerves Pt. 3 - Cognitive Dissonance

The longer I've taught, the more fascinated I've become by the psychological aspects of learning – how we absorb information, how we remember it, how we group, process and understand that information – and how best to apply those psychological principles to the guitar, bass or keyboard.

The theory of cognitive dissonance is one such principle. In its (heavily) simplified form, it states that people strive for consonance, or harmony, between their expectations of the world around them and its reality. Essentially, that we strive to adjust or justify our beliefs whatever the evidence, using whatever means necessary to rationalise our behaviour or opinions even in the face of massive quantities of contrary information. Think about that the next time you watch a politician being interviewed or have a row with your girlfriend.

An oft-quoted example appears in American social psychologist Leon Festinger's 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, which details the behaviour of a UFO cult called the Seekers who believed that an alien spacecraft landing was imminent, and that such a landing would result in the Earth's destruction. The cult members all met at a pre-arranged place and time, believing that in this way they alone would survive the coming apocalypse.

Needless to say, no such apocalypse was forthcoming, and yet the reaction of the cult members in the face of the absolute discrediting of their faith's most essential tenet was astonishing – far from becoming disillusioned with their cult and its leader, their faith actually deepened. The cult members decided that in fact, what must have happened was that their actions in preparing for the apocalypse had convinced the aliens to give the entire world another chance.

Somehow, the Seekers had collectively rationalised the absolute blunt disproval of everything their belief stood for as a reinforcement of those same beliefs, and because the apocalypse hadn't happened, they must therefore go forth and preach their word around the world! At a very primal level, the Seeker members had to reconcile two totally contradictory belief systems and had perfomed logocal somersaults in order to perform this feat, rather than abandon their beliefs in the face of the evidence presented.

This behaviour may well seem unhinged – and observed dispassionately, it is. And yet we all do it, every day, whether we're willing to admit it or not. For example, studies have shown that gamblers are more confident moments after they've placed their bet on a horse – because it's too late to change the decision. Students have been shown to judge cheating in an exam less harshly after being induced to cheat themselves.

It's not all negative though. The “Ben Franklin Effect”, for example, cites the legendary statesman's observation that performing a favour for a rival can actually increase one's feelings of affection or friendship towards that person.

A 2007 study involving preschool children and Capuchin monkeys- which frankly sounds like the recipe for more poop-flinging than the average brain can conceive of- showed that both groups reacted similarly when presented with choices between items and proffered the idea that in fact cognitive dissonance is an evolutionary trait, something hardwired into our brains as a safety valve. A 2010 study involving fMRI scans of brain activity seemed to confirm this, showing that rationalisation behaviour takes place within seconds- far too quickly for conscious contemplation.

So what does all this have to do with nerves and guitar playing? Well, one of the consequences of this principle is that we tend to try and resolve any dissonance between our expectations and reality as simply and as quickly as possible. Project confidence and you will feel more confident – and therefore less nervous. That confidence will show itself in your playing – having the confidence to finish an idea your way, to hold a note because you want to hold it, not fill a space with a dozen badly played ones because you're trying to play catch-up to what you think somebody else would play.

Posture can play a big part in this – the classic “alpha male” stance has the back straight, the shoulders back, chest out and the chin slightly upturned, showing the confidence to display the vulnerable throat to a potential adversary. Try to assume this posture doing day-to-day activities and you'll find it has a remarkable affect – essentially, by assuming the outward trappings of poise and self-confidence, you'll begin to develop the inner ones.

Obviously, confidence alone won't get you through a performance if you don't actually know the stuff – so do NOT regard this as an alternative to practice! -, but projecting an air of confidence can even fool and audience into thinking that even any mistakes are under control, and can help you ensure that any such errors don't interrupt the rhythmic flow of a performance.

Like so many things, this whole idea can be broken down into a simple common sense approach – if you approach a task, whatever the field, with trepidation and fear, worried solely about what might go wrong, you're a lot less likely to accomplish it than someone who goes in with a positive, “can-do” attitude. So head up, chest out, shoulders back – go show that audience how it should be done!

Dealing With Nerves Pt. 2 - Mental Rehearsal

Our biggest fear is, and always has been, the unknown. So what's the best way to combat this? Make the unknowns known.

Obviously, traditional practice and preparation play a massive part in ensuring a strong, confident delivery whatever the performance situation. But we can definitely do more to support this aspect, especially in today's busy society when practice time is always limited.

 

The technique that we're going to look at today is mental rehearsal. At its heart, this idea is very simple – imagining, visualising in as vivid detail as possible exactly how you're going to perform the piece, scale, or exercise. It may sound ridiculous, but this is a well-used technique among many athletes and professional speakers. It focuses on taking advantage of the brains' limitations in discerning real from simulated experiences – for example, have you ever had a particularly vivid dream in which you've argued with someone you know? It can be hard to shake the residual feeling of hostility when you see them again in real life.

Let's try this in action. Firstly, take the song you're working on. If you have the transcription, set it in front of you. Listen through the piece, tracing it through on the transcription if you have it, or just listening and remembering the notes if you've learned it by ear. Now, do this exercise again literally playing air guitar to it, visualising the notes, the movements and the character of the articulations (bends, slides, staccato/ legato attack). This helps cement the association between the movements, transcription and critically, sound.

Now, when playing the piece with instrument in hand, try to feel where you feel most comfortable with it, most “in the groove” where you really feel that you're channeling the flow of the music. Try and remember exactly how that feels – be it a colour, shape, flavour or texture. What you're doing here is setting what's known as a “peak performance signal”, to give yourself something solid to aim for when practicing.

It's also worth mentally rehearsing from both your own and your listeners point of view – if you were hearing the piece, how would you like certain passages to be expressed, dynamically? And switching perspectives, how would you articulate that passage to achieve that goal?

Essentially, for all the neuro-linguistic jargon associated with this technique, all it really boils down to is thinking, very hard, about what you're doing. And that's very rarely a bad idea.

I'd also advise researching the exam venue – Google Earth and Streetview are excellent for this- particularly for those of you who are drivers and need to assess parking- and see if you can talk to anyone who's sat an exam there. The clearer the picture you can form for yourself of what to expect, the fewer unknowns you'll be facing and the more confident you'll feel that nothing is going to throw you off your performance.