Stuck in a Rut (part 2)

This exercise for breaking out of a rut uses a the principle of "restriction as the basis of development". It's particularly useful because it uses (arguably) the most commonly used scale by rock, jazz, and blues guitarists. The trusted and time-tested pentatonic scale.

The notes which make up this scale appear across the fingerboard to provide five, easy to learn patterns which utilize comfortable 2 note per string patterns within comfortable reach. Despite how easy each of the five patterns are to learn and play with, frequently only one or two of these patterns are used, and moving these patterns into other positions is the most common means by which many players change key.

The following exercise serves to address this by expanding the familiar patterns and approaching pentatonic scales from a horizontal point of view rather than a position based (or vertical) point of view. This approach forces exploration which wouldn't normally be undertaken by sticking to familiar patterns.

I use this as a good 2 hour pentatonic exercise:

Part 1 (1^st hour)

Spilt up an hour into 6 parts of 10 minutes. Pick a pentatonic scale (what a pentatonic scale is, and what notes constitute each pentatonic scale in any key can be found in a number of places). Play just on one string, on each string for 10 minutes, exploring all the notes available on that string in your chosen scale.

Part 2 (2^nd hour)

Split an hour into 12 parts of 5 minutes. For 5 minutes each, play on each of the five pairs of adjacent strings (1&2, 2&3, 3&4, 4&5, 5&6). Then play for 5 minutes on each of the four groups of 3 adjacent strings, (1-2-3, 2-3-4, 3-4-5, 4-5-6). For the remaining 15 minutes, play on all six strings.

Getting some form of backing track like a 12 bar blues, or a simple chord progression is also helpful because this will give a tempo reference for exploring phrasing.

New Standards

A lot of the time, guitarists seem to have curious targets. They define quality playing and aspirations as “I want to be as good as player X”, “I want to be able to play solo X”, “I want to be able to play jazz” etc…

While these aspirations are in no way bad things, and could serve guitarists well as short-term goals, they could often be taken much further. Why can’t you have the desire to be better than any player you’ve heard? Sound impossible? It isn’t impossible for a number of reasons. Here are only some of them:

Natural Ability on Guitar? (April 2009):

“I frequently hear people speak of some guitarists as being ‘naturals’. Where guitar playing is a skill, the guitar itself (in it's current form) is an instrument which has had its basic shape and form invented, and then it has gone through a process of evolution. A guitar is not a natural instrument like the voice. As such, how can you attribute anything regarding the skills people need to play a guitar to be in any way natural?

The nature of a skill is that it is learned. Where there are people who have an aptitude for learning certain things at different speeds from others, that isn’t the acquisition of the skill itself, that’s the speed at which the skill is acquired. The skills required to play the guitar are obtainable by anyone (of ‘normal’ physical and mental capability) because of the nature of what a skill is.

If anyone has concerns about whether or not it’s possible to obtain the skill of guitar playing, they are unfounded. If anyone has concerns about how fast these skills may be developed, this is simply a question of how much effort you need to make. After that it’s just a matter of discipline, determination and perseverance. How much of each of these three things that you will need is relative to how good you want to be.”

Taking all this into consideration, it shouldn’t be too difficult to conclude that pretty much anything that can be done, can be done by you. This is something I find myself saying to my students all the time. Furthermore, a direction that the guitar can be taken in the future can come from you.

Raising standards is important to guitar playing because without higher standards and more challenging targets, the guitar doesn’t get to move forwards. If guitar playing fails to move forwards, it’s at risk of becoming stagnant and tiresome. At it’s very worst, if any serious and committed guitarist doesn’t aspiring to take the guitar further than they found it, their aspirations “to be as good as” rather than “better” could actually be considered a contribution to the instruments stagnation! This brings me to what I’m going to be focusing on this year: Taking the guitar past the point at which we found it, raising standards and as we move into the future. As we are growing, changing, evolving, and improving our lives, so we need to ensure that we don’t leave the guitar behind, and take care to bring the guitar with us.

New Updates

Hello!

In response to the feedback I've had about this blog, I'm now going to be updating it in a more structured way.

Posts will now be on the first and third Sunday of each month (starting February 6th 2011).

The Enemy of Text

I’ve spoken to a number of people (with opinions and ideas that I value) and canvassed opinion within online music forums about the CGPW project and one of the issues which frequently came up was the quantity of text that I seem to use. It seemed to matter far more that people actually had less! The quantity of it seemed far more of an issue than the quality or what was to my mind, the ‘value’ which I could offer within the core CGPW manual!

I’ve started a new paragraph here, and started using different fonts and other such formatting changes in direct response to some of the suggestions that have been made about this. I'm not going to get this right first time, but if I experiment, I'll find something that works...

I have always written a lot, and within the core manual for the CGPW I wanted to offer a lot. I didn’t want to short-change anyone and offer as much as I could possibly get out with the latest revision of the project. It has been ongoing for so long and I’ve become so close to it that I’ve gone through phases of wanting it to be the greatest guitar publication ever, and yet I’ve learned that with every new revision that’s an impossible task.

I guess sizes and colours matter…

Content is one thing. Presentation is quite another, and for a long time, I've disproportionately looked at only one of these things thinking (naively) that the content can carry it... Not true.

In a broader sense, and in directly relating this experience to the ideas and suggestions within the CGPW project, I’ve taken all of this on board and looked at radically changing everything I’m presenting to the world!

I’m looking at style, fonts, formatting, colours, the lot, because ultimately, if more than one person is telling me the same thing, then there is an issue to be addressed. Ironically wordy as this blog post may be, this brings me to my key point, which is the flexibility and willingness to adapt and evolve. It follows the principle that there is no such thing as failure, only feedback. There are only actually ‘results’ of our actions. Failure and success are labels which we place on our results afterwards but ultimately they are ‘results’.

If the results I’m getting is actually “less people are going to read what I’m trying to get across purely because of the way in which it’s presented”, then I can’t help feeling that a measure of ‘failure’ has to be attributed to my results.

Is this a bad thing? I would have once thought so, but not any more. Now I look upon it as a new starting point and an opportunity to improve, evolve, adapt, update, progress, and ultimately succeed.

Ironically wordy as this post may be! Expect some more colours, diagrams, pictures and videos from now on rather than my usual pages of words!

New Year, New Horizons

Back in January 2010, my first post of last year was entitled “New Year, New Ideas” and it introduced a module on phrasing. The following posts (interspersed with some more general posts on guitar playing) remained focused on this one topic for the next few months. This year, I’m going to looking at broader perspective, and look at long-term goal setting and the value that it has. While it’s sometimes important to focus on one topic and immerse your playing into a program for developing that one aspect of your playing to a high standard, it’s also important not to lose focus on longer term goals and to this end, I’m going to be making some posts on more general aspects of guitar playing in terms of long term goals and target setting (along with some other thoughts and ideas) for the foreseeable months ahead.

New Year: Old Wisdom (part 2)

As the end of another year draws closer once more, I've found myself in a somewhat familiar annual position of organisation, planning, and making all my usual lists of goals for the year to come, reflecting on what I've learned, and continually returning to time tested wisdom which I tend to look to often when it comes to making plans. I mention this because it's only really time tested wisdom (together with experience) that can authoritatively guide the decision making process. Time tested wisdom is such a valuable resource when it comes to making plans that I don't make any plans without carefully considering it. I might set all my eccentric and fearless goals with uninhibited ambition, but the strategies and planning that I devise in order that I may reach these goals are always guided by a more reliable and dependable resource of wisdom.

I've tried to accumulate quite a bit of what I've learned into the following, but as it stands I would wish it to be considered unfinished. This is because I strongly believe that everything can be improved, and that while this is my own (current) thoughts, I believe that they ought to be considered from an individuals point of view, and then modified to include and incorporate thoughts and feelings from their own experience. This makes time tested wisdom more personal and relevant which is at the core of the Contemporary Guitar Performance Workshop philosophy:

Time and money are two things that we only get to spend once. With an unlimited supply of each, we could achieve anything with sufficient, focussed work. Without an unlimited supply of each, we must work smarter rather than harder, and remember that success is born of the level on which we think, not the level on which we work. We must act, and then we must watch and listen, thinking carefully about what we see and hear. We must continually assess the outcome of our actions and react and adapt to the results of our continual assessment. From here we empower ourselves to succeed. From here we are no longer guessing what may work. By ensuring that our decisions are guided by our experiences, we may remain focussed on targets, reassured that with each guided decision that we make, we are drawing closer to our desired outcome, aware of where we have been before, never to be condemned to repeat the same mistakes, for there is only one "true" mistake, and this is to fail to learn from a mistake.

Workload and Awareness

As ever, there are times when workload can have an impact on guitar playing and guitar practice, and the last few weeks have been a good example of that for me. Rehearsals and recording sessions have been the priority recently and at the end of these kind of days, the last thing anyone wants to do is sit down and actually 'practice'. It can also feel like it isn't necessary when playing a lot, but the actual impact that rehearsals have on playing is almost always 'reinforcement' of what you can already do. It is only on rare occasions that skills will be developed in these circumstances, and new ideas and concepts introduced to playing when undertaking heavy rehearsal and recording workloads.

What this brings me to is the importance of awareness as to how your playing is developing, or rather, how your playing is being shaped by your actions. There is actually nothing wrong with spending a period of time rehearsing and recording and it's often a necessary part of being a professional musician but to remain aware of where your playing is at, and where is it is going is imperative if you don't want to lose the skills you've worked hard to develop. For example, if you are aware that you have a lot of playing to do which will be using one technique exclusively for a period of time, it may well be worth developing a short, concise, but highly focused practice routine which exclusively explores other techniques and commits a period of time to reinforcing those, just so that you don't end up losing them to the commitment of time to only one thing. Similarly, if you are going to be playing a lot of single note soloing, devising a similar routine to explore rhythm playing techniques and chordal work would help balance out your playing. Reading notation is another skill area which can suffer if rehearsals and recordings are for a bands original material (where it will be rehearsed and recorded without the aid of notation), so it may be worth devising a practice routine to reinforce those, especially since this skill can be one of the most difficult to develop because in the practice of reading skills there is little in the way of immediate rewarding guitar sound!

In conclusion, remaining aware of how you are working with the guitar is affecting your skills and ability to play it is imperative if you are to guide your playing in the direction you want to take it. Look at what you are actually doing with the guitar and ask yourself how much that is affecting your playing and how much it is reinforcing certain skill areas, and more importantly, try to identify where you could improve this situation by devising short, concise, and focussed little practice routines to directly address this.