Category Archives:Practice Tips

Day 126 : The Trick is to Keep Breathing share

This week marks the start of a new month and so I have started a fresh new practice routine. This opportunity to reconnect with my goals and further refine my process feel like coming up for air after 30 days of keeping my head down and more-or-less slogging it out.

Some unexpected new features of this month’s routine grew quite organically a new tempo scheme I thought up last week. Basically, this month I will be doing my 2 hour technical routine at one specific tempo each day. The tempo will increase incrementally over the successive days of the month. I chose to start at 60bpm on May 1st and steadily increase the tempo by a 2bpm daily increment. On the final day of May, practice will be at 120bpm. The plan is to repeat this agin next month, but maybe start at 70 and go to 130bpm.

I am also sticking to 1/8 subdivisions for nearly all the exercises. In the 60bpm range this feels very much like playing in slow motion. It is fascinatingly counterintuitive the way that the keys to playing faster can only be found by forcing yourself to play extremely slow. As I move through the same exercises that I have done hundreds and hundreds of times this month in extreme slow motion, I can feel long held tensions breaking up and drifting away in both my hand and in my back and shoulders too. More than a few liberating moments in this weeks practice.

I plotted out the +2bpm daily tempo scheme on the May practice sheet, matching each calendar date with it’s prescribed tempo. Then I realized why stop with just tempo? I prescribed each day a tonal key center and a fretboard position to make sure that I cover all tonal exercises in all keys and that all chromatic exercises get moved to all possible hand positions. I dawned on me to do this when I noticed that without a prescribed key/position plan, I tended to do all my exercises in the key of G and in first position.

I also noticed the potential to create an unwanted correlation between tempo and position if I just moved up one position every day. That would result in me practicing lower positions at lower tempi and vice versa. So instead I moved the positions around in 5ths so it went something like 3rd-10th-5th-12th-7th… etc. This correlated with the daily key chosen.

In other news, we are nearing the first ever Gables Guitar Recital in about 10 days. I have been practicing a Tommy Emmanual piece that I hope to play at the show. It’s sounding pretty good and I’m getting through it fairly consistently in practice.

I was looking around for another new song in case I need to play 2 things when I came across the new single by Kurt Vile. It’s called “Pretty Pimpin'” and its amazing. One of the best songs I’ve heard in a while. I spent a good long time yesterday and today playing it in slow motion. I hope to have this one ready to and maybe I’ll get to play it at the show!!

DAY 115 : Quiet Is The New Loud share

Today’s practice was dominated by these thoughts about dynamics:

Dynamic control (along with subtleties of rhythmic timing) is among the highest levels of refinement we concern ourselves with in terms of pure technique. To interpret a series of discrete notes with rhythmic and/or dynamic intelligence allows us to bind them together into something phenomenologically different: the melodic line. The notes themselves are like strands of amino acid floating lifeless in the primordial oceans. The melodic line created once the notes are interpreted is alive.

Rhythm continues to hold an ever more enduring place in western musical culture. Infectious rhythms of remarkable complexity have swept across the globe with the undeniable influence and ease of the wind itself. From origins in Africa and Southeast Asia over to Europe and the Americas, musicians have for centuries been engaged an ongoing rhythmic dialogue that has resulted in a breathtaking plurality of counts, dances, phases and beats.

Dynamics, on the other hand, seem to be suffering the opposite fate. Dynamics seem to be suffocating in music culture. What was once an gentle gradient from pianissimo to fortissimo has been increasingly downsampled to fewer and fever layers of subtlety. When popular music conquered the musical world of the twentieth century we were introduced to the regime of the “quiet” verse which sets up the “loud” chorus. Then the digital audio revolution came along and introduced more and more dynamic compression in post production of recorded music. The result was music had a loud verse and I loud chorus. When I listen to music being produced now, it is startling how the dynamic scale has essentially become binary. Popular music today can sometimes sound like you are hearing a Morse code consisting of every sound in the world flashing alternately against rhythmic inserts of silence.

I’m trying really hard not have this post veer into the realm of music criticism. I really don’t care who is making what or why (at least I don’t care anymore ;) ). I just think that it is interesting to realize that I grew up in the middle of this trend where the 2 most important threads of musical intelligence began to follow wildly opposite paths. Rhythm went headlong down the path of development and dynamics is being choked out of existence.

I only point out these apparent cultural trends because of how the musical cultures in which we live and work influences how we direct our attention. The development of a musician’s rhythmic intelligence is in 2016 a given. Intelligent rhythms are in the air everywhere now. I have noted throughout my own musical development a certain natural ease to interpret the rhythmic domain, and not just in terms of beats and subdivisions, but also swing and subtle placement of attack in and around the beat. That rhythmic sense is built into a cultural language in which we are all fluent.

Dynamic subtlety (like subjectivity in our narrative arts or nuance in our politics) is not part of our cultural language. The extent to which musicians in 2016 wish to develop and employ a sense of dynamic range in our work, is the extent to witch we operate outside the influence of contemporary music culture. Without this realization we can easily discount, if not entirely overlook this entire domain of musical intelligibility.

Like some examples of early music devoid of rhythm, music which employs only a binary sense of dynamics is not fully alive. In my next revision of the practice plan I will weave dynamics into the exercise routine.

Day 111 : Further Down the Spiral share

When I first started playing guitar I had no interest in doing technical exercises. As cheesy as it sounds, I just wanted to rock. I wanted to be loud, fast, and to be both in and very much out of control. I quickly learned that playing guitar required some amount of disciplined practice. But just how much technique is needed to clear a wide enough channel of self expression for our ideas is for each of us a very personal matter. Even within my own pursuit it feels like a moving target. Then again, I’m hardly the same person I was when I first pickup up a guitar 20 years ago.

Since those early days I have taken several swipes at getting better. Over the past two decades I can trace the almost planetary orbits that seem to be bringing me back around to the same grindstone of technical practice. I work toward some particular goal for a few weeks, months, or as long as I can keep the discipline together before the need to compose, write, record, sing, or bang the drums becomes so great it ultimately snaps my resolve and I go sailing off into a creative bender. I abandon practice and play only whatever comes out. I try to record these ideas and shape them into songs as gently as possible, having leaned the hard way how they are so easily crushed.

Eventually though, as this emerging pattern suggests, I bottom out. I come out of the creative fever feeling like I’ve done all I know how to do. I listen back to the cassettes, CDRs, MP3s, Voice Notes and I’m generally satisfied by the progress. Then, after a few days I decide (as I always do) that what I’ve made is still incomplete. It needs to be more deliberate. It needs to be less derivative. It needs to be more honest. It needs to be more worth people’s time.

So I hit pause on the creative spaceship and beam back down to the studio full of scales, arpeggios, foot stools and metronomes.

To someone on the outside this constant back and forth between practice and production might seem like a rut. But I’ve noticed that each time I come back it is with a greater wealth of accumulated experience both technical and creative. I’m returning to the same place. I’m doing the same kind of activities, but the goal is better defined and the path is becoming more clear. To me this path is not a rut. It is a spiral. And it can keep going this way forever for all I care because I enjoy both sides of the work. Just when you can’t stand another day of broiling summer, it’s fall to the rescue.

Hmmm… How did we get here? I really thought this blog post was going to be about how I am doing a really good job of tracking BPMs in my practice routine. After several years of trying to more faithfully incorporate metronomic discipline in less and less half-assy ways, I’ve finally resolved to take the scenic route to the top of the BPM mountain. I’ve gone back to using a single BPM for my practice routine which I have been increasing by 1 tick each day.

I started at 75BPM and my plan is to get to 300 by the end of the year. Today I reached 90 and I’ve been able to keep up all the exercises steady and relaxed down to the 1/16 note subdivision. Nearly all of them I can also do T/16 and some (like basic tremolo) I can still do 1/32 with no tension. I am hoping that raising the BPM by only one click per day will be gradual enough to hang on to at least 1/16 rhythms up to 300. Time will tell.

Even though the destination of 300BPM is a long way off, I am learning things at every BPM along the way. I’m thinking of it like crossing a continent on foot. Along the way I am mapping every tree, hill, river, and any other detail that catches my ear. I suspect that the indescribable sum of all these little details found in the low lying tempi has something to with a players ability to reach the highest peaks of speed.

So that’s interesting, right? That’s worth reading, isn’t it? I feel the need to include just one more thing that isn’t really interesting: I need to remember not to eat before practice. Every time I do I regret it. Not worth a whole dedicating a whole post to that, but it’s worth noting. Coffee is ok though.

Day 109 : Growing the Process by Combining Techniques share

As I start each morning completing these 2+ hours of technical drills, usually one or two new things occur to me. These ideas that come to the surface during practice are generally ways to perform exercises more efficiently or comfortably. Sometimes I find an aspect of the technique that I’ve overlooked or didn’t know existed, and that usually calls for the practice routine to be amended or otherwise changed. The margins of my monthly practice plans over the last 100 days have become covered with penciled-in notes and mods in my effort to capture and implement these ideas.

I have also lost several of these small revelations when I chose not to stop working to write them down. I’m sure I will find them again someday, but losing some of them also makes me realize that I should try and do a better job of keeping notes. That’s when I remembered this blog which I am so inconsistently updating. So I am going to try and record the notes of my daily practice sessions here in the blog starting……. NOW!

It is interesting that as I have been adding techniques over the past 109 days, I have also been subtracting techniques. I hesitate to allow myself to think that any aspect of my technique is beyond the benefit of daily drill exercises. The first few minutes of my routine is still essentially slow alternate picking of the open strings. It doesn’t get any more basic than that, and yet I still do it every day because I keep finding more subtle ways to do it better. However, this ongoing experiment into exhaustive technical study continues to lead me to discover ways in which two separate aspects of technique can be combined and practiced simultaneously. When this happens 2 line items on the practice sheet combine into a single line item and a sort of “subtraction” of 1 line item is achieved. These small gains in efficiency are what has allowed me to slowly add techniques to the practice plan without extending the duration of the drill exercises beyond the 2 hours I can reasonably devote to this kind of work each day.

Some of the biggest combinations came early in this year. In January I realized that I didn’t need a whole separate battery of exercises for intervals, chords, and inversions. I could simply combine the study of chord inversions with appropriate technical exercises which are often used to create them on guitar. For example, the combination of bidirectional sweep picking with 1 note per string arpeggios is one rather obvious combination. I’m continuing to find more musically elegant combinations of technical exercise with theoretical construction, many of which were not obvious to me at first. Some of the most recent include combining two handed tapping technique with linear (single string) arpeggios. I have also combined diatonic chord scales with thumb-over-the-top exercises.

When I flip back to the way I was working just 100 days ago, it makes me excited to think how different, how much more efficient my practice routine will be 100 days from now. It seem like I have found a way to work in a routine that is both highly consistent but also slowly evolving and improving itself.