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.

New Academic Year: Old Wisdom (part 1)

As we start the new academic year, a lot of people are having to re-acclimatize to a new head state. No more mornings of waking up at 10am, and back to work, and the old "routine".

Routine is very healthy for progress, and while it can take a while to get used to after a long break, it's absolutely one of the best things for practice. It needs to be guided by sound principles though, because the wrong kind of routine can actually be counter-productive. The way to ensure that the routine you're returning to is going to give you the results you want and the benefits of your work, it's good to have some kind of simple points of focus to maintain your work on the right course towards your objectives.

This is one of the sentences which I use a lot in the thinking skills project that I've been teaching in workshops, and one of the best ways in which routine should be guided:

"You live, the way you think"

Simple and straightforward, but then all the very best ideas often are. Think of this as you plan your routine, and you won't go far wrong.

Left Hand Dexterity and Control

This is the tab which accompanies the youtube video lessons called "Left Hand Dexterity and Control" in 2 parts. The 'Real' version (rather than this hand written one which was scanned into the computer) is going to be available soon with the new project update/revision.

Left Hand Dexterity and Control (Part 1)

Left Hand Dexterity and Control (Part 2)

This is also available on the CGPW facebook page.

Contemporary Guitar Performance Workshop Facebook Group

Since the whole of the internet seems to be in a slow process of being taken over a day at a time by facebook, I felt it only sensible to have the CGPW project represented there. I can hardly complain, since I'm on that site quite a bit. The CGPW facebook group can be found here:

CGPW Facebook Group

Please join, and invite friends who you feel may be interested!