Phrasing Videos

I've had a couple of messages letting me know that the videos I embedded into the "New Year, New Ideas" post don't always seem to work.

I don't know how to fix this problem beyond posting the links to these videos on youtube which are here:

Phrasing video 1

Phrasing video 2

Impossibility?

The next blog I was going to post on here was going to be the next installment of the phrasing module that I've been working on and teaching this month although I've been working on the Contemporary Guitar Performance Workshop main course over this week, and I've been working through the closing section which contains some ideas which are very much consistent with what I've found myself sharing with my students when they've tried some of the exercises for developing their skills with phrasing.

From the closing section:

"Take each new piece of information, each new idea, each concept, and each person’s perspective, and use it as a starting point for your own exhaustive experimentation and explorations. If you take onboard other peoples ideas and consider them to be ends unto themselves then that's what you will confine them to be through perspective. Avoid putting things into this 'perspective prison', and try to recognise where other people do this. Some people protect their ideas, opinions, work, and attitudes by presenting it to the world in such a way that you can easily get the impression that there is no other way some things can be done (it’s a favourite amongst politicians). This is sometimes true when it comes to cold, hard facts, but not always. Keep your mind open, and what seems impossible can sometimes be exposed as just a good challenge, and not clear cut 'impossibility'."

New Year, New Ideas...

Hello, and happy new year!

This year, I'm going to be focussing on quite a lot of phrasing in the modules that I'm teaching. There is so much information on scales, chords, picking etc with loads of exercises everywhere, that I thought that to focus on phrasing, and really look at it in depth would be offering some "value", rather than to re-print pages of scales and picking patterns so that people can develop the skills required to play super fast scale and arpeggio runs.

While I've called this blog entry "New Year, new ideas", I'm actually going to start with some old ideas from my youtube channel:

"Phrasing part 1"

"Phrasing part 2"

These video lessons, while in essence very simple, actually get to the very root of what "phrasing" really is and offer a good starting point. As a very general rule, (and as always there are exceptions), phrasing is a question of stepping outside the patterns which people seem to practice, but not in terms of notes, in terms of note values and rests. Patterns generate a measure of predictability, but breaking patterns generate a measure of interest. Music actually requires a measure of both of these things. If you think in terms of sentences and paragraphs, and never fear rests and leaving space, you will be "speaking with your instrument" rather than just rambling off a scale you may have learned. Spaces contextualise your note choices and give them a position in time which is essentially what phrasing is all about. "Note choices in context".

In the words of Buddy Guy: "Notes are just a way of getting from one silence to another."

More of my video lessons can be found online here

One Note At A Time (part 2)

This exercise is another very simple procedure, but with far reaching implications and a great depth from which some very good things can happen to your guitar playing.

Rather than for me to explain it at length here, the exercise is well explained, with some really good, honest opinion on it on the following linked blog entry. I'm fortunate enough to have had someone take this lesson and comment on it first hand, so rather than to have me speak of this exercise's virtue, on this occassion I can actually post a link to another blog which not only explains exactly what to do, but also offers some critical feedback on it:

From Sam M's Blog:

"I recently took a guitar lesson where the first exercise was to play 10 individual notes, and after playing each one, to rate it from 1-10. It took me a good 10 minutes to grasp what I was being asked to do - play 10 notes, one at a time, anyway you like; loud, soft, dull, bright, muted, with vibrato, maybe bend it, the list goes on... What this exercise pertains to is the translation of what you intend to play, and how close this is to the actual sounds you make when you do play. I found this to be enlightening and scary in equal measure - my average was 8/10. This doesn't sound too bad until you consider we're talking about single notes played one at a time. What this means is that the average note I play on the guitar is only 80% as good as it could be. Scary.

This might seem like a very pedantic and overly-analytical way to look at playing an instrument, but think about it a bit more and it makes sense. Everything else - double stops, chords, flashy solo runs - are made up of single notes. If each note isn't as good as it could be, it stands to reason that neither are any of the above - neither is the rest of your playing, in fact."

Expanded upon here:

http://playitagainandagainsam.blogspot.com/2009/04/active-learning-self-awareness.html

Perseverance or Reassessment? (part 1)

Within the lessons that I teach, I frequently observe the same kinds of things that students seem to do a lot when they’re trying out new licks or ideas. A lot of the time they will attempt the idea, get stuck at a particular part of it, and then try again only to repeat exactly the same mistake. Perseverance once more and determination will drive them to make another attempt, but yet again, the passage grinds to a halt at the same place. I still have similar experiences myself when I try out certain new things, although I take a very different approach to these situations now than I once did. At the point where a student has made the same mistake (or just ground to a halt) 3 or 4 times, I ask them to stop.

It is at this point that an awareness of one of the key components of practice needs to be recognized and responded to. Practice is essentially made of two key components. These are assimilation and reinforcement. Assimilation is the process of learning new ideas. Reinforcement is the process of maintaining and strengthening those ideas.

Taking this into consideration, at the point where a new lick has ground to a halt more than 3 or 4 times, the assimilation process has actually become a reinforcement process, and worse still, it’s actually become a practice of getting something wrong! The assimilation process had not sufficiently been completed before subsequent reinforcement should even be attempted.

At the point where an attempt is made to perform a lick and it’s ground to a halt (or a mistake has been made in the same place) 3 or 4 times in a row, stop. Stop playing and reassess. Reassess by thinking about why the idea is grinding to a halt or why the mistake is being made? Is it too fast? Is it too difficult for the time being and needs to be re-categorized as a longer-term goal? Is it too slow and actually boring to practice? Any of these (and plenty more) reasons could be influencing what is happening, but even if you stop and don’t pick up the guitar again until the next day, to persevere practicing getting something wrong could actually be worse in the long term.

One Note At A Time (part 1)

One of the most misunderstood, but simultaneously one of the most long term beneficial exercises that I give to my students is a series of perspectives on playing only one note, and then stopping to think about it. These perspectives are most often misunderstood because the process of engaging in a exercise which has very little in the way of immediate "rewarding guitar noise" can seem a long way removed from the kind of guitar playing that they would often like to be able to perform. The exercises can be boring, frustrating, irritating, and at worst, actually discouraging from practice. I would argue, however, that they are absolutely worthy of every serious guitar student's attention.

Based on the principle that essentially all guitar playing (in any style and to any standard) is born of perseverance, the first "perspective" is a very simple question to ask oneself before practice, and then once again after a note (or a few notes) have been played. Where we can chose and direct what we persevere with, it's worth offering considerable conscious effort to carefully identify what may be worthy of our perseverance rather than to "sub-contract" that responsibility out to teachers, books and magazine articles. In the interests of making the best, most effective and economical use of practice time, asking the very simple (but far reaching and highly potent question): "How do I really want to sound?" may seem simplicity itself, but how far can an answer to this question go? To what extent is the potential answer "I want to sound like player X/Y/Z etc..." appropriate or in any way helpful? Why ask it? "What are the benefits of such extensive consideration?"

I would suggest that the more detail you can go into in answering this question, the better. The more players as reference points or influences you can list, the more resources you may draw upon to structure a method by which you can achieve your goals. The more descriptive the sounds and the more you can be as specific as possible in every aspect of "how you really want to sound", the better chance you have of sounding as close as it may be possible to that sound you have in your head. Answering this question as fully, and as accurate as possible will guide almost every decision you will make that will offer a considerable contribution to your playing. Choice of exercises, teachers, instrument, amp, pedals and other equipment (where appropriate), in fact almost every part of the activities you engage in, in order to become the guitar player that you want to become is influenced and guided by the answer (in all it's comprehensive detail) to this one simple question.

Stuck in a Rut? (part 1)

This month, it's back into the academic year, and a frequent complaint from some of my students has been that while they've done a lot of playing and practicing over the summer, they felt that they've been playing a lot of the same things, over and over. Not just with technical "reinforcement" exercises, but with improvisations and melodic ideas, with fingers always seeming to fall into the same places. Just over the last week, the exercise I've given these students to combat this problem/challenge has been very effective. As with all the most effective exercises, it's very simple:

Divide and hour up into 4 parts of 15 minutes each. For the first 15 minutes, improvise (preferably exploring some musical and creative phrasing, and using a variety of scales, arpeggio, and intervalic ideas) without using your 4th finger of the left hand (or right hand for left handed people). For the following 15 minutes, do not use your 3rd finger at all, just fingers 1,2 and 4. For the next 15 minutes, just use fingers 1,3, and 4, and for the final 15 minutes, just use fingers 2,3 and 4.

This is a variation on the "restriction as the basis for development" principle which I outlined in an earlier blog, where only the inner 4 strings are used to perform exercises. This time the exercise is designed to break up the patterns that fingers get so used to when practicing scales and other technical exercises across the fingerboard. It can be frustrating, but it's worthwhile because once this exercise has been completed, returning to all 4 fingers on the fingerboard opens up a wealth of potential!