Its the brain that plays guitar

Playing Technique
#34

I didn’t fully attend but when I started classical guitar I was 17 and took private lessons from Peabody’s Julian Gray. He was training me with the intent that I would enroll. All we focused on for the first 6 months was tone production and technique/positioning. He did have me playing some actual (though simple) compositions, so it was not just scales and arpeggios. But getting just the right posture (torso and hand), keeping the proper amount of tension to sound the string and getting just the right combination of nail/flesh (not to mention the annoying nail care/buffing routine necessary) was pretty involved. Looking back with decades of experience and thankfully pushing through some dogma due to breakthroughs like CtC, there are parts of Julian’s approach I’m now a little critical of, but the majority of it was solid instruction and I can’t think of any other way to learn tone production than what he showed me. There’s just no concept of that in plectrum picking. I mean, yes, there’s good/bad sounding pick attacks, but I just think addressing that is so much more simple compared to getting a good sound from a nylon string, with nails. Most other instruments have some other accessory or mechanical aspect that assists in tone production. On classical guitar, really the closest thing we have to that are the frets. Everything else, it’s up to our hands/fingers. The tolerance of error is really unforgiving.

It’s reasons like this that I have huge amounts of respect for anyone who reaches levels like David Russell, John Williams or (my favorite) Christopher Parkening (though his technique is not as good as the other 2…still…he sounds better lol). To get through entire pieces of the classical repertoire with extreme attention to phrasing, dynamics, musicality, rubato etc with seemingly no errors is pretty staggering. I’ve played pieces at the highest level of the repertoire (Barrios, Tarrega, Bach etc) and I just can’t fathom their level of control over pieces of that difficulty. It’s a huge challenge to get through even an intermediate or even beginning level etude with zero errors. It’s such a different type of skill than shredding. But yes, the amount of work you have to put into it to even get above mediocre makes me question it as a hobby. And that’s all it is for me anymore.

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#35

Haha to even be considered mediocre these days, one has to be “next level” eh?

Haha it’s been that way for quite some time for the “finished” instruments (violin, piano, etc) so yeah, guitar is going to get ugly! I guess it’s on us to find an efficient way to assimilate and then expand upon the lore that came before us!

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#36

That would be great! I’ll send you a PM.

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#37

It’s not just the brain, and I will bring up those autistic savants. I hope I don’t get banned, but there is no way you are going to convince me they are using more of their brains. It is the soul that is singing those sounds, sure you could do all this research on how their brains are always like a small child’s so they can endlessly learn the musical language deeper and deeper. But it’s not the brain doing the creative thing, it’s in your gut, in that middle part of your body, the warm area that screaming this is who i am. And the older we get the more it is harder to find it because we are constantly bombarded with such analytics that we forget how to portray who we are and what we are feeling because the world is a scary place, especially now more than ever. so if you keep on using your brain chances are you will sound more and more robotic, and it will be harder to hide it. not saying that it’s bad, many artists will create mechanical looking art, nothing wrong with that, but to say it is the brain is not reflecting on the bigger picture.

#38

I completely disagree with this statement:

So this idea that every virtuoso practiced 8 hours a day and that’s what’s necessary is absurd.

If your goal is to consistently compete or perform at a world-class level, yes it’s necessary.

Michael Phelps didn’t just jump in the pool for an hour a day to win twenty-three gold medals. Is he gifted, certainly. But he didn’t work any less than the next person. Kobe Bryant out-worked everyone. Yngwie was obsessed “I was a freak…”, as was Steve Vai when he spent months on end using nearly every waking hour practicing and learning. No life, no relationship cultivation…just work. Even EVH said words to the effect of “I didn’t develop these techniques over night. I didn’t just ‘know’ how to do this. There was a LOT of trial and error and a ton of work involved.”

Genetic limits aren’t where we (humans, I mean) tend to falter. We lose focus, lack the will or in other words “don’t care” enough. That’s not bad or good - it just is. As CtC has proven time and again, physical (or genetic) limitations are rarely the core problem.

For me, an enormous part of the fun of this rather enigmatic instrument is the chase. As Les Paul said:

A guitar is something you can hold and love and it’s never going to bug you. But here’s the secret about the guitar - it’s defiant. It will never let you conquer it. The more you get involved with it, the more you realize how little you know.

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#39

I would largely agree, but I would add the caveat that often we think that efficient technique is the result of long hours of practice, it’s actually reciprocal in nature. The discovery of efficient technique enables high practice volume and makes the process of learning easier, and more enjoyable.

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#40

That resonates with me a lot. I don’t even enjoy playing things I’ve “mastered”. It just seems so much less fun than playing things I’ve yet to master.

I never played 8 hours per day, but for a stretch I religiously did 5. Looking back, I lacked the feedback loop that is crucial. Doing the same thing, the wrong way, for 1000’s of repetitions is possibly worse than just having a more “lazy” approach and only doing similar for 1 hour per day. It’s very important when we play to be analyzing what we’re doing. Was it correct? Great, do more of it! Was it wrong (loaded term that goes way beyond if the notes were clean…it should include ease of execution etc)? Find out what was wrong and fix it, then go through the loop again.

I was most definitely just passing time while running scales/arpeggios/patterns and even similar regarding playing actual pieces. It’s sort of sad looking back, because this was truly wasted time.

Successful players, like virtuosos, whether they practice 3 hours per day or 10, are likely “doing it right” the whole time. Maybe we can say they were figuring stuff out in the first several years, but the majority of their reps are the productive sort. Not the type that just burns up minutes on some clock

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#41

I totally agree - but for players like Vai, EVH, Yngwie, EJ etc., where efficient technique kind of ‘happened’, those hours seem necessary. Each one had to figure it out for themselves. As a result, you get different (but often strikingly similar) approaches. In his recent interview with Rick Beato, Yngwie said he never thought about what ultimately became what we term Yngwie’s ‘picking rules’.

#42

Probably the most crucial thing CTC has taught me is

“Perfect practice makes perfect”

So whatever you practice, practice it well.

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#43

what about the less ambitious: “problem-solving* solves problems”? :grinning:

*=informed by a mixture of theory, motor learning science and empirical evidence

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#44

I like that a lot, actually.

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#45

A less thought-provoking term is engineering. At its most basic - engineering is problem-solving.

Yeah…math, technology and science are brought to bear…but there’s usually some point where the problem-solver stares at the wall and…basically dreams up the solution.

The solution needn’t be revolutionary…just a solution.

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#46

wait, is it not usually done by building 200 randomly shaped objects, throwing them all at the wall, and keeping the ones that bounce off the wall better? :smiley:

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#47

I tend to skim AND conflate (a horrible combo) but is the new official ctc guidance that we try moving the pick back and forth in 200 different ways and see which one feels the best?

#48

I’ve certainly tried moving 200 different picks back and forth to see which one felt best.

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#49

That’s certainly one way to go about it!!

We forget that Edison conducted over 10,000 experiments before the dang thing worked. The problem I have is failing to recognize something isn’t working. I fall back to the old-ways of “You’re just not trying hard enough.”

Then, after wasting a good month or so being obstinate…I’ll email @Tom_Gilroy…and he solves the godforsaken problem in like…a sentence. True story.

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#50

I only communicate the solution in a sentence. Finding the solution might be immediate, or it could have taken me years.

#51

He also bought the patents of others so he had a better starting point :slight_smile: Still, he definitely put in tons of time getting the shortcomings in these designs right. Not sure if it’s a misquote but I still love the notion that enjoyed the failures because that was one more thing that he knew “wouldn’t work”. Rather than try more of that, he moved onto something else to see if that would work.

#52

I see the buying patents as an efficiency. Someone else figured it out…I’ll buy the rights.

Love it or hate it - Apple’s iPhone broke entirely new ground…without actually inventing much of anything totally new.

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#53

And literally killed off entire industries of similar precursors.

Although much of apple’s success was timing with the fact that the Internet was robust enough by the late aughts to handle the backend of smart phone tech.

Hmmm reminds me of someone’s teaching method and analysis vs its decriers and being actually able to back up this analysis via observation.

It’s like the Henry Ford quote about innovation and people wanting a faster horse.

It’s crazy we have intense pedigree and technical level teaching for all the established instruments and even for some relatively new instruments like pedal steel guitar or theremin. But the six string is treated like this mystical unconquerable thing.