Enough burgers! You need a fit body to let healthy music flow out of you!

What is it with some players who despite their solid understanding of music’s “right” notes, they still get tired (or even fell pain) when playing for a long stretch of time?

The answer is simply that musical performance is an athletic discipline like any other sport, and that the key to effortless playing depends on the body’s fitness, or how to make use of it.

Getting the best result for the least effort is indeed the most elegant satisfying way of doing anything, but is it practice that makes perfect? I would rather say repeating nonsense will achieve fluent, thoughtless nonsense. As the reknown Alexander Technique mentions “prevention is better than cure and hence one is to focus on how to carry out actions to build GOOD habits.” So consult, stop to listen to others with less or no physical shortcomings, and then re-approach one’s methods afresh. Sometimes dropping the stubbornness that something is good only because it has worked for many years is the key to open a new door.

So here follow some guidelines I have over the years shared on how to play comfortably, and why everything IS possible! As you may note, these are split into physical and mental exercises for a reason – the physical is put on first as it is the actual practical task you will try out; however you will surely instantly notice a change in application (maybe easier) when you try out the practical tasks after reading the mental part.

All following physical examples are for a right-handed guitar player:

1. Simply rest the right hand on guitar. The weight of arm keeps guitar in place, so do not try to push the guitar inwards from the right as this effects the posture.
2. Strap to be fitted so that guitar is same angle whether sitting/standing.
3. Thumb should not curl around fingerboard but rather act as a pivot midway behind the fretboard in line with the 2nd finger from the front. If not, the palm of the hand is narrowed, restricting playing of notes on adjacent frets.
4. A good posture depends on your body staying balanced and erect, avoiding undue twisting, with your head, elbows and neck able to move freely, your back standing/ sitting up firm & no twisting of shoulders to side.
5. The shoulder is not to lean sideways towards the guitar. The reason the hand and elbows are free is to pull the guitar inwards to the left of the body, if at all necessary.
6. Avoid picking too loud with right hand as this in turn demands left hand to apply more fretting pressure.
7. Despite a tutor’s guides, the best way to improve is to experience things first hand. A good way is for you to play a piece focusing on new posture without much attention to the piece, then playing the piece again with the old posture. This will reveal how the new posture differs from the old, and how easier it is.

Mental suggestions:

1. There is no way but the best way. It is the easiest to master, so make a habit of that. This is known as the cycle of conscious incompetence > conscious competence > unconscious competence i.e. that first you are aware of your shortcomings, then you practice enough to garner some skill, then your knowledge becomes so innate that you do not even think about it, and it flows out of you when you perform.
2. Mental rehearse what needs to be done, and focus on it before actually playing it. This way the muscles are more liable to react positively as research has proven that the muscles react to something when thinking about it as they would when one actually does it.
3. Practice with awareness of your goals vs too much unfocused practice repeating same mistakes. In other words, playing flamenco differs from playing extreme metal so new postures for each might have to be learnt, as some things will not work for others.
4. Listen to the music to produce a tone befitting the style being played vs just focusing on getting a better tone. As decreasing your physical efforts makes you more sensitive to producing tone colours, and enjoying music more.
5. Instruct yourself with positives not negatives (DOs not DONTs).

So you might still argue that the old way works better?
Well try the new way, see how it functions for you, think about how it differs from your previous methods, and only then reject it.
A Chinese idiom goes: “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.”
And I bet you that if you understand the easiest way, it will become your new habit and you will not reject it. Just as many professional guitar players before you have not.

Change your Burger Sauce

Onto breaking rules, this article does not follow in the lines of any of my previous threads, but is a music business contribution one can get by signing up for the free www.teachmusic.co.uk mailing list..... now onto our burger sauce!

It is safe to assume that a good 9 of 10 guitar players started out hearing some other player's music, what turned them to the guitar in the 1st place. What makes each of them prefer one or more music styles over others is their very pre-exposure to their fave genres which even form comfort zones within their minds regarding what to expect out of music, and hence the very reason why one prefers the subtleness of a nylon string performance over the more fiery chainsaw playing used in early industrial music, or vice-versa, and any sound in between that the different forms of axes may produce. At some stage, guitarists then turn to lessons and to us as educators.

As educators we play the foremost role of capturing our students' dreams, aiding them in their quest to turn them into reality. For most it might just be to interpret some cover songs at their local pub or at a family bbq, but for others getting their name out there just as their idols before them is the name of the game. And this is where music itself takes a back seat and the actual business mind is to be called to the forefront.

For a moment, imagine one runs a worldwide take-away food franchise. Ask yourself if it was love for fast-food that made you start, and probably your answer has nothing to do with burgers & chips than with the opportunity of a fruitful long-term business. Which makes one observe that while musicians have way progressed from just playing their instruments well to learning more about backline, accessories & sound (from choice of strings, electronics, effects & amps to producing, sound engineering & mixing), some still do not recognize the extent it would benefit them if they put their hands on actually promoting their name.

Not via cheap or free routes the Internet nowadays provides, but in actually financially investing in their product to see it hit off the ground.

To return to the take-away concept, it might be less satisfactory running a junk-food franchise than playing music, yet look at the way they run forward - every now and again they change bread, add a sauce or whatever, thus making a new menu out of it. In other words, they create opportunities for themselves. Easy to them nowadays after so many years of success, but in their humble beginnings, there definitely was lots of investment (maybe at a loss of money, but close to surely at a loss of time). So why does it turn out that sometimes musicians do not tend to see the opportunities ahead of them, figure even create new ones? After all musicians are doing what they like most, playing their instrument, so one probes if, by logic, promoting oneself should only come as 2nd nature, same as owning professional gear to sound good! Needless to say, playing music brings a higher satisfaction than selling take-away food not? :)

The point comes in the conclusion. The music industry (as any other) runs on the expectancy that nothing rains free from the sky, but anything has to be worked for. As educators, we are to foster such a way forward in our students, at least the most ambitious. This will pave itself in our students managing their time even further as they start thinking more as self-employed dogs in a world of many more competing for the same bone! I once read in an innovations management blog that "If the tree cannot be moved, a new route has to be found". This is an area that musicians - educators and performers alike - might like to look into.

The fingerboard – the be all, maybe even end all!

Speak!

In whatever country we live, that is the very act we cannot do without on a daily basis. Even if we spend a day alone at home, we end up more than once speaking to ourselves.

The very skill of associating pronunciations to single letters, and how their sound may vary according to their placement in words of our own mother tongue, became innate with ourselves from the very moment of our inception, if not earlier inside our mother’s womb. And daily we use this very skill to communicate opinions to others, presuming - maybe by a good abundance of hypothesis - that the listening party will understand everything exactly as we mean it. Yet when this often results otherwise, we speak again to explain further. Daily, constantly and effortlessly we use speech to explain ourselves.

Now let us bring this to the guitarist world. The fingerboard is our alphabet; the scales, rhythms, chords, voicings, etc the very tools to put letters together to form words, which form sentences (including conjunctions etc.) that form both short and long paragraphs - all joint together to express our opinions in a clear way.

As musicians, at some point in our education we learn the theoretical knowledge that defines what scale may be used and when, and as lead players when presented with a chord chart we recall a multitude of scale patterns that fit. Presented with some one else’s opinions (compare your chord chart to this very blog for a moment), we react to what we are reading by adding our opinions (by adding your own thoughts to my opinions here as you read along, by adding melodic licks and improvising while reading a chord chart). How? By recalling and playing around scale patterns that fit.

That is one way, and a successful one. Yet have you ever considered the maybe more primordial approach of totally forgetting the patterns learnt. Here we go – let us start breaking the rules!

Approach the fretboard only as a series of notes and if, for example, the key chosen is G major (having only one sharp being F), then apply an A-B-C-D-E-F#-G alphabet across the fingerboard, free of any patterns. All you have at your disposal is this fleshy fingerboard with each fret representing a note. Feel free to play all notes as naturals except your Fs that have to be #. You are more than likely to be using scale shapes you have learnt, but you are not thinking of them – you are thinking only of letters! And this is what gives you the freedom a growing child has when unaware of grammar mistakes, a freedom that paves a more adventurous explorative path.

Speak! Play whatever you hear in that inner ear of yours – it is an opinion and it can only get better by speaking it out, getting feedback about its presentation from others, even your own self on hearing it back. This is how solo playing and phrasing is improved. Learning by doing! Think less scalar, think more phrasal.

You get politicians the world over speak bull and marking a niche for themselves, so why not with us musicians whose words, speech, and opinions are of a higher value?

Speak!
As the Romantic playwright Victor Hugo once wrote "Music is that which cannot be silenced", so speak as this world is nicer with more melodies!

The discourse of musicology and timbre

1. How was it possible for Beethoven to create music well after he turned deaf?
2. What was the very fact that made the rumble of bass-guitar-voice-drums that was The Sex Pistols appeal so highly to music researchers from a scientific point of view?
3. What makes an experienced journalist write about music without being a musician the same way you and I recognize the contrasting tastes of two different chocolate cakes, despite neither of us have the culinary expertise to break down their composition as a chef would?

Creativity always having been the epicenter of what I consider makes an artist, innovations to one's music allow its listeners more anchor points to experience it differently out of "the musician's box".

Hence, the above, similar and others, shall be some of the many questions & answers I shall approach once this blog launches, as to convey a sense of looking at music composition not only from a chords & scales point of view, but further!