All fingers and thumbs... again!

 I've been struggling mightily with a couple of new skills for the last couple of weeks.  Reminds me of when I was learning to rest my thumb on a bass string.    Then I remember thinking to myself "this is never going to happen." But it did - though admittedly it took a while.

I'm having the exact same feeling now, and I have a sneaking suspicion it's going to take even longer to get it...  What are these elusive skills?  I think of  them as sequencing and damping. Sequencing of the left hand fingers so the next one is placed before the previous one releases (thus giving that super-cool flowing sound) and damping of bass strings to prevent notes (or harmonics) ringing over and muddying the next bit.    I can see the sequencing happening eventually - though I guess I will have to work out the LH fingering in advance because my automatic choices rarely seem to hit upon the right answer.  And I've already seen that it sometimes involves a more difficult LH fingering pattern.  I guess I'll have to suck it up if that's what it takes.  However organizing my thumb is going to be an entirely different story.  Though I finally succeeded in getting it to rest on a random bass string, the thought of having to make it go to specific places at specific times? Oh my!  And  another thought - if I move my thumb around deliberately, it will also affect my RH fingering...

Question: is this going to take all of 2017 to master?  Methinks it might.

Happy New Year everyone😊

New Year's Resolutions...

Well there are few days to go yet, but it's definitely time to start thinking about New Year's Resolutions for my guitar journey..

So here are some of the things I ought to do if I want to improve my guitar playing, and things I want to do to use the music to help.  In the time-honored spirit of New Year's Resolutions I'll make a bunch in the hope that some will stick!

1) Use the recording button on the phone... a LOT more - even once a day?
2) Stop trekking through the whole piece - instead work on small bits that need work.
3) Set small goals for each practice
4) Practice performing, even if it's humiliating (actually it's almost always humiliating - get used to it!)
5) When goal-oriented practice is too depressing, don't give up - instead set the timer and use it.
6) Learn a duet piece and perform it (with my fellow orchestra delinquent)
7) Practice sight reading every day
8) Create benchmarks to convince myself I'm making progress - recordings, achievements, etc.
9) Learn a new piece to retain and play every 3 months.
10) Start playing at the nursing home again.

Freedom means... quitting?

No - not quitting guitar!  Freedom from not having the time to do the things that are important to you.  Right now with my guitar hobby, It's important that I make progress.  I want to recognize that today I can do something that seemed impossible (or at least insanely difficult) a few months or a year ago.  That's not happening at the moment, and at least one reason is the amount of time I spend learning material for the orchestra.  As our conductor pointed out - we learned about 2 hours of music this year -  meanwhile I'm thinking to myself  - that's awesome but I can't personally play a single tune as a result😞
 So although I will seriously miss next semester - 5 performances, lots of great new music- I'm going to take a break and work on some specific guitar skills.   Of course this may not be the "right" decision, especially as I really enjoy it.  How to tell if I'm doing the right thing? Often when I can't make up my mind I find it's helpful to make a decision one way or the other and then sleep on it. If the morning brings a sense of all being right with the world, then it was the right decision.  If, on the other hand, it brings a nagging sense of unease, (perhaps augmented by a complete lack of sleep) then it's time to take the other path! So tonight, I'm making the decision to quit and  I'm going to sleep on it....

Sight Reading - will it ever happen?

I am so far off being able to sight read simple pieces that it's quite depressing. I'm normally a goal-oriented person (as opposed to a process-oriented person - that's one of those Myers-Briggs kinda things) so not being able to head for a specific goal is frustrating for me.  However it turns out there is a way for us goal-oriented types to get a sense of satisfaction when the goal is miles to infinity away.

The obvious thing is to set intermediate goals - but with sight reading I'm having a hard time even  coming up with those. So I'm approaching the problem a little differently.   I allot a certain amount of time to practicing sight reading each day; set the timer;  move on when done.   (Yes I bought a kitchen timer- it's my new favorite tool and it cost less than $15!) Turns out to be a surprisingly effective strategy - In the past, any attempt to work through sight reading materials hasn't survived more than a few days before other more interesting things have intervened,    This time it's been different.  I'm up to 9th position in my book - strange and scary territory.  I even (gasp!) look forward to doing it.   I'm still scratching my head about that, but I have a feeling that removing expectations and setting a super-achievable goal, i.e. practice for 15 mins, has had something to do with it.

I guess you could call this process-oriented practice.  Come to think about it, wouldn't be a bad idea to apply this principle to guitar playing in general...😶

Practice time: how much sitting in a room on your own?...

I was having this discussion with my guitar teacher about whether I should continue with the classical guitar orchestra or not.  I've been playing in it a couple of years now, and I really enjoy playing with other amateur guitarists, and it's a blast rehearsing with a professional conductor. And I realize I'm extraordinarily fortunate to live in a place where such a thing as an amateur guitar orchestra exists.  However it takes a lot of time - make that a huge amount of time - especially right before a performance.  And to my mind that time could be more productively spent on repertoire or technique, or (heaven forbid) just playing for fun!  But as my guitar teacher said - how many people are happy spending hours a day sitting in a room practicing? Wouldn't I miss the friendships and social aspect?  Well yes.   But currently I'm missing having time to just noodle around, I'm missing practicing my repertoire pieces, and since I requested (and got) more emphasis on developing technique from my teacher, I don't have any fun new pieces to learn.  In fact most of my practice involves stuff I need to do rather than stuff I really want to do (like learn "Arabian Dance" or "Maria Luisa)."

This week for instance, I've been practicing sight reading (still working through the Duncan "Guitar at Sight" book), playing through orchestra parts with a metronome trying to make them consistent, and working on string damping and making shifts without looking at the fretboard.  To my mind none of that counts as "fun."  As a result there have been a few times when I've found myself wanting to read a book (or catch up on laundry) rather than play guitar.  So I thought I'd compile a list of goals/wants, what is needed to accomplish them, and compare it with what I'm actually doing.

Wants:
1. Make music for myself.  (Pieces I enjoy of course!)
.........Play and add to repertoire.

Short/Medium term goals
2.Play for others in a casual setting, without succumbing to an attack of nerves  -
.........Needed - lots of practice playing in public/under stress.  More solid technique (see 4).

3.Sight read simple pieces instead of having to learn them
.........Work on sight reading every day

Long term goals
4. Play better (several grades better)
.........Needed - technical work and pieces from guitar teacher

 The motivation for me playing the guitar really comes from #1 - I really love to make music, I love to progress, and I hope eventually to be able to share or use the music in some way.  Everything else stems from that.   But if I look at my practice time, maybe half of it is on orchestra material, a quarter on warm up exercises, distractions and the odd technical thing I feel like working on, and a quarter on the pieces/goals my guitar teacher gives me. So it's apparent where the problem is - I've missing out completely on things that feed my soul and spending less time than I need to on my goals. Something needs to change.   And the elephant in the practice schedule is most definitely the orchestra stuff.  So if I didn't have that, maybe I could spend a quarter time on new fun pieces, half on technical work/pieces and the other quarter a mix of warm up /playing existing repertoire/distractions.  That's about half hard work and half pure pleasure.

Which brings me back to the question my guitar teacher asked - who is happy spending hours in a room on their own playing and practicing?
Answer:  I think I am.

Learning not to look. What it is (and isn't) helping with

Image from fretjam.com

After something of the epiphany I had last week when I discovered that intensely staring at the fretboard when playing causes me to focus on the here and now instead of thinking (or looking) ahead, I've been working at sight reading somewhat differently.   I've started following the advice everyone seems to agree on - you just gotta keep doing it every day!  So I'm working through my trusty sight reading book (guitar at sight by Charles Duncan) yet again - 15 mins every morning - and for the first time I've now got past 5th position (hurrah)!  However instead of looking from my hands to the book and back again to be sure I'm situated correctly, I'm making a determined effort to find the notes without looking.  Yes, even in 7th position.  And in at least one way it's working - I'm actually getting an internal picture of the layout of the fretboard in my head so I don't have to look to find other notes on different strings.  I should be jumping up and down with joy - I knew this was one of the hurdles I had to surmount before I learned to sight read.  And  I can see this is going to pay dividends when learning a new piece.   But what about the reason I finally made myself do it?  Is it helping me read ahead while sight reading?   Like when it forced me to visualize ahead when playing a piece I've memorized....  ?

The short answer is a resounding NO.  I might be finding the notes faster and more accurately but I'm still not instantly visualizing a measure then reading ahead while I play it.  I have absolutely no idea how people figure out a measure so fast or do these 2 things at once...   So I guess it's back to the drawing board to solve that one.  Not that I'm giving up on what I'm doing 'cos it is getting me closer, but there is obviously yet another puzzle to solve before I get a handle on it.   In the meantime I have had another thought- I was leafing through some materials on sight reading from SCRIBD ( well worth the subscription BTW) and came across a sight reading tutorial that appeared to be nothing to do with sight reading.  More like memorization.  i.e.  Look at this measure.  Get it in your head.  Look away.  Play.  Huh?  I thought it was supposed to be about sight reading?   Thinking about it though, isn't that baby steps towards learning to read ahead?  Look at a measure, get it in your head fast and play it without looking (while you scan what's coming next, perhaps ??)   Might be worth a try.   If there is one thing I've learned from this latest discovery is it's worth trying a bunch of different things 'cos one of  them might just work. 😊

Thinking ahead when sight reading, or when playing from memory ...

I've spent a lot of that twilight time half way between sleeping and waking musing on why it's so difficult for me to think ahead when I'm sight reading.  I know that the only effective way to sight read is to read ahead, but except in the simplest examples I just can't seem to do it.  I become totally absorbed in the note that is playing now, with the result that what comes next can be a complete mystery until I have to play it - with inevitable consequences.  No matter, I console myself.  I'm OK at memorizing and I don't need to sight read (much) at this stage.

And then came the Bach piece, for which I am thankful, really I am.  It's not a hard piece with multiple simultaneous voices - indeed most of it is single line music.  And although it presents some unique challenges for me, I shouldn't have any problem memorizing it, right?   Wrong.   Despite learning individual sections fairly well, when I try to string it all together my mind goes AWOL at random places.  What on earth is going on?   "It's just Bach" people say - but that doesn't explain why it's causing me such a problem.

I set out to see if I could figure out a way to overcome this mental ditziness.  The first thing I tried was actually reading the music ( I know, not my thing) while playing.  This led to the usual issue I have, which is I'm not good at playing without looking at my hands, and of course I can't look at both at the same time.  OK - I thought - I can remedy that - I will practice the piece with my eyes closed - there must be large parts of it I can actually play without looking, I'm just not used to it.   I did have the usual problems with hitting the right place on shifts, but apart from that, a very strange thing happened - I wasn't forgetting where I was. In fact I found myself actively visualizing what was coming next.  Which led me to the realization that this is unusual for me - even when playing from memory I am focused on the here and now and not what is coming next.  There is evidently something about staring at my hands that stops me thinking ahead.  This explains why I sometimes "lose my place" - no doubt exacerbated in the Bach where the different phrases have so many features in common that if muscle memory fails I can't instantly figure out what's up next.

Of course this leads me to an unfortunate realization that in order to better learn pieces, I first have to be able to map my left hand to the fretboard without looking.  This is something I've avoided rather successfully up until now.  Best case scenario - maybe I don't have to totally learn not to look, instead the attempt to play without looking will retrain my brain to think ahead.   We shall see.

Tremolo update

October 2016 - thought I was getting somewhere with this until my guitar teacher pointed out that I had more of a "gallup" rhythm than an even 1-2-3-4.   I really couldn't hear it when I was playing, particularly when the thumb was playing a different string to the fingers. So I recorded it on my trusty twisted wave app (definitely the most user-friendly recording app I've found for the iphone) and as usual, he was right.

 So I tried another approach. This time using the technique suggested at thisisclassicalguitar starting slowly and recording each speed until I was confident I was hearing an even beat on the recording. It was really helpful to be able to relax back into just i and m before things got out of control, and I found it easier to adjust my hand position when only adding a or i to the pattern instead of diving into the complete pattern.   I have been practicing it on the first string and muting the strings with a natty little device  making it easier to hear the rhythm both in real time and on the recording.  I know the left hand works perfectly well to stop the strings if you're just practicing rhythm, but this will eventually allow me to transition to something more musical!  Actually you don't have to purchase anything -you can make something that works just as well by rolling up a small piece of felt and taping it into a cylinder...

I decided that I would do it as part of a right hand warm up for 5 mins each day, and I have been gradually increasing the speed when I am happy with the recording.  It was, and still is, a slowish process and a couple of times I have had to go backwards as I heard that dreaded gallup creeping in...  but progress is being made! Each day I start at well below tempo and move it up, but the starting point is also moving up as I get better at it. [EDIT end of November - starting point is now up to 130 and can get 135 to 140 consistent in tempo but not in volume].   So next - volume control work...

Another way of learning a piece "thoroughly" ?

Apart from nerves turning my fingers into sausages when I try to play for others, my brain seems to go on coffee break and I'm quite likely to get stuck in the middle with no idea how to get restarted.  I know this is because I've only learned it by "muscle memory" and anything that interferes with the flow (like missing with one hand or the other) is likely to result in a blank because my conscious brain kicks in, and "it"  hasn't learned it. (I find it totally amusing to contemplate having 2 brains inside my head that don't speak to each other - much more fun than the scientific description),  I've tried half heartedly to kick my conscious brain into action by learning things one hand at a time - and in fact have had some success with the left hand alone (plus singing so I know where I am), and for short sections needing to be worked out, the right hand alone while reading the score.  However it's totally tedious (ie not fun) and I am having a hard time making myself do it.

So a few weeks ago my guitar teacher gave me specific instructions to practice a piece at an unbelievably slow tempo.  Almost so slow you couldn't tell what was going on.   The intention being I would have time to  concentrate on all the things I don't do well (or at all), like actually hitting all the notes and making them truly legato.   However it had the serendipitous effect of making me think about what my hands were doing.  Indeed I find I have learned the part I was working on quite well.  Admittedly this is just a small sample, but it does offer another way of perhaps getting a piece lodged properly in both 'parts' of the brain.  I don't know if you've ever come across the effect that when you try to play something a lot slower than normal, you "forget" what you were supposed to be doing and get lost. I certainly have.  I'm hypothesizing that at very slow speeds,  the muscle memory sequence is disrupted and your conscious brain has to kick in instead.

Anyway I'm excited to try it - particularly on some pieces I ought to be able to play well, but am prone to "forgetting" in the middle.

Update on tennis elbow - preventing future injury

Well it's been 3 weeks since I used my left arm to any great extent on the guitar, and the pain has subsided considerably, particularly after a fairly intense dose of NSAIDS for a week due to another injury (fortunately doesn't impact guitar playing) Got a consult on adjusting my practice schedule to prevent this happening again - some surprising advice, and some not so surprising.

The not-so-surprising was that the injury was probably caused by too much tension - ie gripping the guitar in a "death grip."   I don't think I'm that bad when playing normally (my guitar teacher might disagree)  though I could definitely stand to lighten up a fair bit.    The real culprit so far as this injury goes was practicing slurs (a lot) using way too much pressure - particularly multiple hammer-ons in sequence.  I blame practicing "Oriental" for that.   I think it's because my fingers are still confused about where the pressure needs to be quickly applied (and equally quickly removed) so they all just go for it at maximum force.   So I guess I'll be working on it extremely slowly (as if I haven't heard that before!) to get that sorted out.

Also not surprising was that at my age (definitely not to be disclosed) I should not be practicing more than 45 mins in a row - evidently blood supply starts to become reduced after that, presumably resulting in less removal of toxic products of exertion etc etc.    So uninterrupted 2 hr practice sessions are out...    After the 45 mins, I'm to stop and ice the injury for 5 mins.

The surprising advice was to warm up the whole body for 5 mins before practicing - yes - large muscles, running, jumping jacks, stair walking, knee bends etc.  Gosh I haven't done exercise like that in about 4 years (and jumping jacks are definitely out on a broken ankle).  However I can manage sit ups and kneebends so I guess its not out of the question.  I don't know if I was too horrified to ask why during the consult, but I suppose as a means to get the hands warmed up and blood flowing it's efficient.  Also probably compensates somewhat for then sitting for 45 mins...

So the routine is -
Large muscle exercises 5 mins
Practice including guitar warm up 45 mins
Ice 5 mins
Rest 5 mins

And if you want to practice more, repeat the whole thing.  Yikes! I can tell you that I'm not used to this amount of (admittedly limited) callisthenics but it does seem to shorten the overall time before my brain and fingers reconnect with the fretboard. That may be wishful thinking though.   On the other hand, a 1.5 hour practice session now takes 2 hours.  And I'm totally tempted to eliminate the second set of 'large muscle exercises' prior to the second 45 mins, or at least reduce it to a few situps and push ups.  Though given that the arm has been cooled down by ice, probably I shouldn't be so tempted. Has anyone else had to adjust their practice schedule to prevent injury?

Tennis Elbow

Ok I got the official diagnosis - tennis elbow or lateral epicondylitis - and the cortisone shot into selfsame common extensor tendon - painful!  After the pain of the injection subsided over a couple of days, the general pain subsided somewhat but more practice over the weekend for a performance at Chestertown guitar festival (great fun - workshops, concerts, fun with friends) put me right back at square one -   which is -  I can play just fine without pain, but gripping or twisting or even extending my left arm at all other times is quite painful, and the common extensor tendon and associated muscles down the forearm are sore when pressed.    So this is finally making me contemplate a serious change in my practice attitude - probably long overdue - only youngsters can go at something with abandon until they quit from mental and physical exhaustion and not suffer consequences!  Fortunately we have a month long break from orchestra rehearsals after this week, which will allow me to rest it pretty much entirely.  The question is, how can I accelerate recovery and change what I'm doing to prevent it happening again?

While waiting for medical, advice about what to do next I've been reading up on tennis elbow.  Yes Google to the rescue - however I'm only reading posts from physical therapists or MD's - so much misguided information out there, particularly on medical issues.  It seems the current thinking is that tennis elbow is not so much an "tendinitis" but more of an "tendinosis."    Tendinitis indicates inflammation (pain, swelling, redness, heat) whereas tendinosis just means there is something wrong with the tendon but we don't really know what it is.  Hmm.    The post by Paul Ingraham was the most informative I found - a list of therapies that have been found in some cases to work (or not), including the original study references.   I tried a bunch of them - I think in my case I have a bit of both tendinosis and myositis because the muscle hurts in addition to the tendon, so I have tried icing, and when it was particularly sore it did seem to settle it down.  However the 2 things to date I have found to be most beneficial are massage (both longitudinally along the muscle and the so-called "friction" massage across the tendon) and stretching or stretching with mobilization (read the article to find out what this is - but easy to do at your desk at work).  Plus rest of course.  This  means not using the left hand on the guitar.  Or does it?  I found out today that if I don't use the thumb (at all) finger pressure does not cause any pain, either on or off the guitar. Thus I have a potential way to practice finger placement without exacerbating the condition, with the added benefit that I will hopefully learn to lighten up with the left hand.  Also I fear if I just do right hand exercises, though I know they are good for me,  I will either die of boredom or mess up the right hand or both!

Accordingly, things will probably be quiet for the next month, but I'll post again when I have more input on what I'm doing that caused this in the first place (actually I/m pretty sure I know what I was doing wrong - too much pressure when repetitively practicing a sequence of slurs) what I really need to know is how to change things so I don't do it again!

OH MY! I overdid it..... trying to rehearse without the guitar (!)

I was really enthusiastic to get started practicing my guitar again after a summer where goals were somewhat fluid and messing around became the new norm.  Orchestra rehearsals have started (with some really fun pieces - yes!),  I got a new piece to learn from my teacher (OK I said I didn't want to do any Bach, but apparently it's what I need to be doing so...  Bach it is).  And I went back to concentrating on those pesky slurs....   Maybe there was a little too much enthusiasm - but when my fretting arm started to hurt after practice,  I was thinking  - "it's just like when you start to work out muscles that have been idle - they stiffen up and hurt for a few days until they get used to the new regime".   However a few days later, my arm still didn't feel any better - in fact there was now pain around the elbow in addition to the forearm muscles.  Time to do a little research - i.e. probing around in the elbow region and checking out the internet.  Physical exam turned up a few quite tender spots where the muscles attach around the elbow - rats! the tendons are now involved in addition to the muscle.  Tennis elbow anyone?   Ignoring it is not an option - I am prone to tendinitis and I'm definitely smart enough to desist before I cause a chronic injury.  On the other hand I need to prepare for an orchestra performance coming up in 10 days... it's a quandary.   So my best bet is to get serious about rest  and anti-inflammatories.

The first thing I did was to stop playing the guitar.  Well strictly speaking I am still practicing small amount, but moving my left hand into the correct positions without pressing down, or sometimes just playing the right hand (this involves singing, which can be painful for everyone else, but I'm used to it!)  I'm hoping this will work because most of what I have to do with the orchestra pieces is familiarize myself with the music enough to know the timing and how to play the next part...  for sure I'll have to wait and see if this hands-off approach works though.  Next call up my trusty orthopedic physician and request an urgent appointment for a possible cortisone shot.  I guess they know me too well from when I was heavily into skating, so I get 'fitted in' next week.  In the meantime I dig out the ice pack and apply it on a regular basis and put myself on some anti-inflammatories.

Next problem - what to do about the scheduled 3 hour rehearsal this week?  That's surely not going to qualify as "rest" and I know if I take the guitar, my resolution about not playing will last about 5 minutes.   So I go to the rehearsal sans guitar.  It turns out to be quite useful - I found I could hear a whole lot more of what was going on when I wasn't concentrating on my own playing.  I got all the instructions, and importantly, so long as I followed along with the music, I was getting the same  auditory cues from the other parts that I would have if I was playing, so I don't think I missed out too much.

I came away with one additional piece of information - the 'castor oil' treatment. Huh? ... what's that, you might say - reportedly local application of castor oil and heat has an anti-inflammatory effect that can work wonders.  Being a veterinarian I would have thought I should have heard of this -  sounded like quack medicine to me.    Nevertheless after enthusiastic recommendation from our orchestra conductor I google it - and find that indeed, it not only has a long history of being used to reduce inflammation, the active ingredient is a known anti-inflammatory.  So I repair to the pharmacy for a hot pad and a bottle of castor oil and with my arm swathed in an oily rag and a voluminous heat pad I look a little odd... but do get lots of sympathy for the sore arm! So the sixty four thousand dollar question is,  is it working?  After only a few hours it's probably too early to tell, but after a couple of applications it seems to be helping.  Of course this could merely be the placebo effect - but as they have now demonstrated that the placebo effect usually involves actual physiological changes, I'll take it!  So if the rest doesn't work, maybe the castor oil.  And if not the castor oil, the cortisone shot will almost certainly fix it, at least for this episode. The question remains though, how to avoid this in future?  Will have to pay attention to "smarter" practice...

 

musings on adult learners, self-directed learning and musical vocabulary

There's a lot of learning theory about how adults learn.  As an adult guitar learner I find it interesting to read about it and compare it with my own experience.  Some of it rings true:   yes, I read around the subject and learn things on my own; I do question why I have to practice some things and what the benefit is;  I hear pieces I like and bring them to my guitar teacher to see if I can learn them,  However some of it doesn't - in particular I'm not a fan of self-directed learning.  Ok admittedly I've probably steam-rollered my guitar teacher over the last couple of years into helping me learn what I want to play, but I am also acutely aware of the fact that I often don't know enough to make an informed decision about what to learn. As a some-time educator myself,  I understand the concept of having students reason out the answer for themselves, but it does involve the prior step of giving them or pointing them in the direction of the materials they need to figure out the answer.  In the context of guitar playing - how to give a coherent description of what I feel is missing from a piece I'm playing?   What if I know there is something wrong but can't describe it because I'm really not sure what's going on...

Come to think of it maybe I need to work on my musical vocabulary.  In pathology one of the first things the students learn is the correct way to describe things - for example there are a myriad words that can describe precisely how stuff is scattered about in a tissue (I won't bore you with them, and only being an observer rather than an actual pathologist, I'd probably get half of them mixed up). Anyway, until they learn those terms students have a hard time accurately describing what they are seeing - translating a visual medium to a written one is after all, a long way from intuitive. And in some ways merely knowing the words should open up the possibilities of things to find when examining a tissue - or in the current context, listening to how a musical piece is being played. So the next question is, where to find these magic words?  I suspect my long-suffering guitar teacher will end up with this question, however in my defense he is partially responsible because he didn't like my use of the word "clunky" - which in my opinion perfectly described the mess I was making of a pretty melody.   However I will admit there are probably more precise terms... Question is, where to find them?  Google is remarkably lacking in answers, so perhaps I'll start building a list of suggestions...

Not legato
Chopped up, punctuated, jerky, disconnected

A pronounced beat that shouldn't be there
Metronomic, heavy downbeats, 'beaty'

Opposite to lively...
ponderous, dragging, listless, dead, lifeless, strained

Uneven sound quality
bumpy, erratic, wobbly,

Why should I switch frequently between practicing different things?

Over the summer I "took" one of those free Coursera courses on learning theory.  Quite interesting - it reinforced something I lucked into when I last studied for exams (I think it was in the dark ages but it may simply have been so long ago I have difficulty remembering).   I had a busy first job when I sat for specialty Boards so my learning schedule involved studying in the evening and reviewing it at 6 am the following morning before work.  I passed the exam, and it so happens modern learning theory seems to be confirming this is the best way to make things stick. i.e. learn something, review it when it's starting to disappear.  The course has some other interesting things to say about learning - such things as highlighting is a waste of time, constantly testing yourself works best, and summarizing in your own words is next best.  I can't see that highlighting or summarizing are useful techniques for the guitar, but testing yourself (look away from the music, can you play it?) is certainly a time honored way to get things into memory.  However what I'm particularly interested in at this point is this concept of 'interleaving' - very ably explained by Noa Kageyama in his blog - basically spending practice time switching between different learning activities.  It does what my serendipitous learning schedule did - making you keep pulling things back when they are not quite there, but in the course of a single practice session instead of overnight.... It certainly can be quite frustrating when you are doing it, but there is a lot of research indicating it speeds up the learning process.

Quite apart from learning theory, I now discover there is another reason that its a good idea to switch often between activities, particularly those that are stressful for the hand - and especially if your joints and tendons are not quite as young and resilient as they once were (let's get real here, mine aren't at all young and resilient any more).   Having successfully badgered my guitar teacher for exercises,  I was determined to apply myself. Indeed I thought I'd work in the  "do it 10x without mistakes before speeding up" system at the same time.   Boy was that a bad idea!  Spent way too much time trying to get to the next level, and after just a couple of days I started to get twinges in an entirely new place on my fretting arm.  I have been known to overdo it in the past, but usually ending up with just a slightly sore muscle,  but this was something different...  At least age comes with some degree of common sense, so I abandoned the exercise for a couple of weeks and limited my guitar playing to non stressful things that caused no pain.  Didn't do much to advance my technical skills, but thank goodness the arm pain disappeared.

Now I'm back to practicing the exercise - however I'm limiting the time I'm spending with a timer, and then moving onto something else. I'm even thinking of applying the timer method to all the things I'm working on ... I'll have to let that one sink in for a bit though before exposing myself to the mental pain.  It's a lot more satisfying to work on something for half an hour than it is to pull yourself away when you're just getting it!

Getting distracted: what to do?

I wish I had an answer for getting distracted.  I'm not one of those people who have problems practicing - or at least I didn't think I was.  Guitar for me is something I look forward to, not something I feel I should make myself do.  Mostly anyway.  Although I don't make rapid progress, I assume I am moving ahead slowly, although I have had to resign myself to the fact that it will take a while, whatever "it" is.  How slowly? there's one passage I've been working on that my fingers just don't want to reach cleanly, but over the weeks (no, months) since I started, I'm finally getting it. No problem - eventually I hope to add it to my repertoire but there's no rush.

However over the last couple of weeks I figured I had some preparation to do - both for the start of orchestra rehearsals and for recommencing regular lessons.  Time to get down to business!   I wrote in my handy log book some goals for the week - restricting the number of items on the list so I could concentrate better (and hopefully make some progress before I was put on the spot).  So now the list merely had a few warm up exercises, an exercise given to me by my teacher to "help me learn where the notes are"! (ouch),  a list of orchestra pieces I have to learn over the next several weeks, and section of a recent piece where I need to revamp the fingering on so as not to miss out the ends of the arpeggios.   So far so good...

As the week went on I noticed that the list was getting longer.  How did that happen? Well, when I worked on something not originally on the list (I mean really worked on it - not just playing for fun)  I added it to the list  and gave it a little check mark.  Day by day the list was getting longer, check marks were being added, but painfully few next to the original list items.   Hmmm.  Turns out despite my best intentions, I was actually mostly ignoring the things that needed to get done in favor of things I felt like working on.  There in front of me on the log was the proof - I had probably spent less than half the time on my urgent list items. And what was this I added? "practice flute" ??   Not likely to do a lot for my guitar playing!

My log has thus identified one factor that could be contributing to lack of results - I'm not actually spending much time on the things that I'm using to measure progress!   I do think I'm doing better at "practicing" rather than playing mindlessly -  just not focusing on immediate goals.   So this leads to the next question: if the whole reason for learning guitar is to have fun, do I need to change the way I do things?  I'm doing it to have fun, but part of the enjoyment is the sense of accomplishment from tackling more adventurous pieces successfully...  On the other hand, turning it into work doesn't do it either.  This summer I had a brief period where I focused exclusively on technique to the exclusion of having fun, and I fairly quickly found myself inventing reasons not to pick up the guitar.  Gosh I hope  there's a happy medium.    Maybe I'll try to limit working on additional list items to just one time per day and see how that goes... stay tuned!

What are the 10 most useful things I learned this year?

I know it's not the end of the year, but it is the new semester, and coincidentally it's been exactly 3 years since I started taking group classical guitar lessons (individual lessons didn't happen 'til later).  In fact when I started I didn't even own a classical guitar - I took lessons using an English steel string guitar my mom bought me as a generous and much-appreciated gift to encourage my new hobby.  I figured that was OK - I didn't really intend to learn "classical" guitar anyway, just wanted to learn some  basics.   How wrong can you be?

Anyway, at least in part for my benefit to hammer them home, here are some of the useful things I have learned this year -not in order of importance, just in the order I thought of them :)

1. Exercises improve a lot faster if you use a metronome.  Really.  I practiced one slur exercise for weeks and weeks on and off and didn't make any noticeable improvement until I started practicing with the 'nome - then I made more progress in one day than I had in the previous several weeks.  Why?  it made me slow down then stop and practice the movement in isolation that had been holding things up.  Which leads to...
2. Isolate difficult parts down to the smallest possible movement.  And repeat it slowly until its in muscle memory.  For some reason this is incredibly hard for me - I always want to speed it up before I've actually really got it.  Which leads to...
3. Don't move on until you can do it 10x without errors.  This can be soooo frustrating....  but it works.  I've been applying it to the parts of my pieces where I stumble most often. with  good results.  However it does require patience and I am woefully lacking in that area...
4. Improvising with the rhythm or harmony of a piece you already know can really help you learn the piece more thoroughly.  I'm terrible at reading guitar music - I memorize it way before I can actually play it, and then rarely go back to the notation (unless forced to by my teacher). I also haven't reached the stage where I understand the music I play - apart from picking out the melody line I just play the notes - I know, gotta long way to go.   However I had 3 separate nudges to do some 'improvisation'  recently (once from my teacher in a slightly different context, once from an instructional webcast, and once from folk camp).   Turns out that was exactly the number of suggestions required for me to actually try it.  Most notably I found I had to go back to the music (gasp) to find out which chords were being used and where they were, and to figure out the underlying structure. It was quite educational ;)  I ended up with a variation on the first half of a piece I often play.  I know, not kosher for classical guitar, but I'm just playing for fun so sue me!
5. Learning to sight read is a long slow process.   I wasn't getting anywhere much by using the beginning sight reading books - I know what the notes are if you point to them, but my fingers don't seem to map them out.  I think this means that I should actually do some technical work - scales in various intervals perhaps.  Helpfully, my teacher just gave me a really dastardly exercise (the first of a series, gulp)  that addresses this issue.  Maybe by next year I will be able to report progress in this area.
6. Memorization involves more than muscle memory.  I've heard this so many times,  and I truly believe it, having now blanked out on a regular basis when playing at the nursing home. Unfortunately the fixes for it mostly seemed out of my reach.  Such things as   "visualize the notation in your head" (oh right - that music I haven't looked at in recent history!), or "be able to play the whole piece through with each hand separately without the guitar."   Um.  I must have the wrong kind of brain.  Then out of left field, a suggestion from another musician (non-classical guitar player) seems to have helped.  He suggested practicing the left hand by itself but with the guitar. I thought I already had this until I tried it. Nope.  However it wasn't that hard to relearn the left hand without the aural and RH cues,  and yeah! it seems to be helping.  I have read that the conscious brain gets in the way of your muscle memory when you are stressed - so you need to learn your repertoire with the conscious brain as well as the "unconscious" one (AKA muscle memory).  Seems that learning the LH by itself even with the guitar present must get that conscious brain working -  and speaking of right and left hands...
7. If there is a part that is causing you trouble, practice the right and left hands separately.  I can't tell you how many times this fixed a problem that seemed insuperable, but somehow I never seem to remember it until all else has failed...
8. If you want to be able to play for others, you need to practice playing for others.  I've written a lot about this because it's my personal bailiwick, but my take home message is to start by finding the safest venue you can where it's just not possible to fail.  You aren't doing yourself any favors if you try but crash and burn, because that failure adds even more stress the next time around.  Everyone has a different stress-inducer  - for some it's being on stage, or playing for large numbers of people, or people you don't know, or whatever. For me it's the fear of being judged and found wanting.  Thus my low stress environments have been areas where evaluation (of me) isn't an issue: playing in a public park and for a dementia unit in a nursing home.  And I had to do it many times before the stress started to abate.   I've learned a lot as a result and my confidence is slowly building.   I'm not ready to play for a knowledgeable audience yet, such as the guitar club, and even playing for my teacher still gives me problems, but I can see the next step might be a casual open mic where the audience are not guitarists...   
9. Recording yourself is a humbling experience but incredibly useful. I don't do this enough.  You hear about 10x as much when listening to a recording as when you are playing.  Even if it's just an iphone recording. I'm making a resolution to do it more even as I write this!   And there's a reason that the teacher needs to see your hands if you are learning by Skype.  I've only ever made one video recording (on the iphone again) and it was more mortifying than humbling, but having the picture of what your hands are doing adds another dimension to what you can learn. And as a ski instructor once pointed out to me when we were being videotaped, everyone else has already seen how you ski so you don't need to worry about them!
10. Playing with others jump starts your learning. If you get the chance, join an orchestra or ensemble.  I am learning a long list of things that I doubt I would have got around to yet if not for the orchestra, such as strange exotic rhythms, keeping time (including with strange exotic rhythms ;)), artificial harmonics, percussive techniques, playing repetitions in different positions, extensive use of dynamics ....... oh and being able to play without looking at the fretboard all the time ;)  And last but not least my guitar friends :)

Taking stock

Well it's the end of the summer and I'm back to guitar lessons and practice again.  It's amazing how a break can make you look at things with fresh eyes - I don't remember feeling like this last year - but maybe that was because I continued having lessons over the summer, doing pretty much the same thing as usual, just at a more leisurely pace.  I feel like I ought to take stock - it's not a new calendar year but I feel like it's a new guitar year, so regardless of the date I will do an end of year roundup.  And contrary to my usual pessimistic approach, I will concentrate on the good things that happened as opposed to what fell through the cracks (or yawning chasms... I know I said I wouldn't be downbeat but just that one little comment ;))

  Let's see, at the beginning of the year I was happy to be starting to work on a piece I had been waiting to learn -  "Birds flew over the spire" by Gary Ryan, I moved from G4 to G3 in the orchestra, which was good because I didn't have to keep tuning down and at least some of the music was mildly tuneful.  I learned the piece and we played several performance including opening for a "real" guitarist!  I got myself a great new guitar,  and despite it being a longer scale than my trusty 630, I was finally getting accustomed to it.  My biggest worry was I was still having a lot of problems playing for anyone but myself.  Even recording on my phone often involved hours of effort until I settled down enough not to choke.   So what has happened since? I've been playing almost weekly at the dementia unit of the local nursing home, and although my progress in confidence has been slow, it's definitely coming  It seems to have gone in stages - at first each visit was really really stressful.  I don't think my heart rate returned to normal for an hour after I left, and each time it was a survival exercise.
Then gradually I noticed I was becoming less panic stricken, I could even eat lunch after leaving!  I was also getting a lot less bothered by my mistakes and much better at forging ahead regardless.  However my playing left a lot to be desired - I was still blanking out and making lots of mistakes, and on top of that  I was having a hard time ignoring all the stuff going on around me leading to yet more mistakes.   I took note of the areas I had trouble with or "forgot" under stress and made a point of subjecting those parts to my latest attempt to improve my conscious memory - learning the left hand separately.  And on subsequent visits those parts at least didn't cause problems.  I also work every time on not analyzing my playing as I'm going along.  Thinking "I've messed up that x8$! part again" invariably results in further mistakes. Instead I'm making a conscious effort to think ahead on how I want to play the next bit. Also when there is a disturbance, same thing, I try to haul myself back to thinking about what dynamics to add to the next bit.  Of course it doesn't always work.  Once I turned up not feeling especially with it, and  additionally failed to warm up beforehand. We will draw a veil over that visit - If nothing else it taught me I absolutely have to warm up - no exceptions. And if things aren't going well, dial it way back.   However recently I am finding  I'm playing more of my pieces much closer to how I play them at home - not totally without mistakes, but that rarely happens anyway.    And just today I played at least half the pieces pretty close to how I normally play them.   This comes right on top of another first - at folk camp over the weekend one the teachers asked me to play something for them, and I did!  It's been one of my goals - to be able to comply if someone says "play something for us"!    Maybe I will even think about playing an open stage or open mic this year - not because I am at all interested in trying to perform, but I want to know I can do it.
Was there a particular secret to making progress?  Not really.  It was mostly getting started then persevering.  For me that involved finding a venue that wasn't a huge leap up in stress - ie a place where I didn't feel judged.  And then it was a case of keep doing it until the stress started to settle, After that, gradually working on better preparation (still got a long way to go there). The biggest thing was having done it once, it was in the back of my mind that I'd done it before so I could do it again.

So that's the good stuff.  So far as playing goes - I don't know.  I was talking with some friends about it at camp, and it's funny - we were all coming to the same conclusions.  When we started to learn our instruments, it was enough just to be able to play a tune or two. We weren't too interested in doing the technical work.  Now we are realizing we need to go back and apply ourselves to the technical work to make those tunes worth listening to!  So I guess that's progress of a sort - you need to know what you need to know....and once you know,  you can go ahead and work on knowing it!!!  :)

Ouch! that hurts!

You know, the feeling in the pit of your stomach when you receive criticism and you haven't figured out what to do about it...   I get this feeling when I think I have done a reasonable job playing a piece and then discover all the things that are wrong with it, in fact how truly bad it was, it's probably hopeless, perhaps I should give up ...   Yup that's the way my brain goes - ever on the downward spiral.   Even when I have asked for and want this critique, and am truly appreciative that someone is helping me to get better, a primitive part of me wants to burst out crying, run and hide, and give in to negative thoughts. It turns out there is a scientific reason that people respond to criticism differently -  this article talks about studying the way your brain responds to criticism using fMRI to track which areas of the brain are active.  Some can just brush it off, and others of a more neurotic bent have to spend time processing, and this is reflected in different patterns of brain activity.
Of course in order to improve we all need helpful critique.  When I find there is still (unexpectedly) a lot of work to do on a piece,  I've found it best to just leave it alone and sleep on it - sometime in the intervening period my brain climbs up from the abyss and is ready to start working on ways to address the problems.  It seems to do its thing in the background even when I'm not consciously thinking about it.  On the other hand if I rush straight back to the piece,  I've found I'm rarely in a place to carefully analyze the issues and move forward  - I try too hard,  hurry too much, get frustrated and often end up making things worse.   I'm still looking for a way to move straight to this point without the intervening delay, but so far it's just not happening!

Benchmarks, long term goals, even (shock horror) exams - do they have a place?

Maybe it's because I've been without structured playing over the summer (no lessons, no orchestra) but I've been thinking about long term goals a lot recently.  I know it sounds like an oxymoron - i.e. developing a game plan for an adult guitar student learning for pleasure and relaxation.  And indeed for many, I suspect it's not even on their radar. After all, once you add goals, deadlines and expectations to a hobby meant to provide relaxation it probably defeats the purpose, right?  Well, yes -  except when the lack of concrete goals or a means to measure progress causes additional anxiety.  For some of us the road just has to lead somewhere - an endless path just doesn't cut it.   I know when I started this hobby, the goal of making music, any kind of music, was sufficient - leading a song with 3 chords at a local song circle was a major achievement, as was learning to fingerpick  'Freight Train'. Of course that was before I got into classical guitar, which indeed has enough challenges for a lifetime and then some. So for us type A personalities, what challenges can we set ourselves? It's not like we have a whole lifetime to devote to it, and we are not walking the path to classical guitar as a career.  Where should we be going with this?  I know I have friends who got into CG having been bowled over by a repertoire classic such as Recuerdos de la Alhambra, and started the journey with a goal of learning to play it (perhaps not realizing how far along the journey they needed to be before doing justice to it, but that's as may be, it's still a big goal to strive for).  So perhaps that's the answer - a far ahead goal that may or may not be achievable, but gives meaning to the process.  Personally I don't have a repertoire piece that is my holy grail, and in fact have doubts that I will ever play any of the famous pieces.  However I do have a wish to improve and eventually use the music in some way over and above playing for my own pleasure.  However that's one of those nebulous 'out there' things that can't be measured.

So that brings up the next question for me. What should I select as a long term goal? And what benchmarks should I use to check off milestones along the way?  When I started learning guitar I had a physical reaction (very very negative!) to the thought of tests that children (or the adventurous adult) take when learning an instrument. Now 3 years later I'm actively looking for a way to prove to myself that I am actually making progress instead of spinning my wheels.  No - exams are not even remotely on the horizon, but it would be nice to know at approximately what level I am working, and when I have mastered the skills needed for that level.  I don't think current repertoire is necessarily a good indication except in the broadest sense. After all, students at many 'levels' may be playing the same piece, but their ability to make it sound like music varies enormously.  Maybe that's why CG only has the vague categories  'beginner' 'intermediate' and 'advanced' for learners. It can be quite a shock to realize after several years effort you are still playing 'beginner' pieces!  Personally I didn't realize until recently that this was not abnormal - hopefully the way I was playing those beginner pieces was improving though.  However that still leaves me scratching my head for a long term goal (whether or not it's achievable).  I've asked my guitar friends about this - one of them is indeed learning one of those 'goal' pieces - Sakura - so beautiful and definitely goes on my list for 'one day.'  Another is content with playing for family (yeah - she has family who are interested!) and a third wants to learn to read music and play some pop songs.  They're not much help to me - as you may have gathered I don't have a holy grail piece I want to learn, my family are not interested, and I can already read music and play a few pop songs (though I could always learn more :)) I'll have to try out some goals for size, and maybe ask my guitar teacher for guidance on benchmarks when I have decided.  I'm nervous that he'll think I'm crazy for trying for ridiculous goals, but what the heck, you only live once.   I'm thinking I could pick a level that's a long long way off (grade 8 pieces?  entrance standard for a community college guitar program?) - and work towards it. As an aside I recently discovered that Simon Powis offers certificates of achievement for subscribers to his Classicalguitarcorner courses, which may be an option for satisfying my need to document progress.  Incidentally, I have found that site to be something of a gathering place for enthusiastic adult learners...  an e-community of sorts, which is great because amateur CG doesn't seem to have that many social opportunities compared with, say, acoustic guitar.
Do others have longer term (maybe never) goals or am I the outlier?  Feel free to comment!

The Power of Ten ...

Image from Rhino Daily

I wonder why we sometimes know perfectly well how we are supposed to practice and yet still go blithely on doing something else?  Maybe because it's more fun or requires less effort?  It is certainly no fun continually  messing up when playing through pieces.  I have a piece that I really like, and can play through adequately, but each and every time there are lots of little missed or damped notes, buzzes, or hesitations - and realistically this probably represents the places where if I try to play those particular measures in isolation I can get them totally right only a percentage of the time.  Expecting all the 'rights' to come together when I play through the entire piece is thus asking for the impossible, yet that's what I do. I've tried isolating sections, slowing them down to get them right and speeding them back up, but those errors are still creeping in when I play through the piece.

This week I determined to try to practice tricky bits until I could play them perfectly 10x one after the other.  I first really heard about this technique during a flatpicking workshop - "practice a movement slowly until you can do it right 10x before speeding up!"   I decided to apply the system to my problem piece a little differently.  This piece is already at tempo, and as I said, I can nail the physical movements most of the time, just not every time. So instead of slowing these sections (a measure or 2) down, walking through them slowly, then gradually speeding them up, I slowed down only slightly and started on the repetitions, with a couple of seconds breather between each one.  Oh my!  At the beginning I was lucky to get to 4x before an error would creep in and I'd have to start again.  As I worked through this process in several different problem spots I began to notice a pattern - Initially I wouldn't be concentrating too closely, so around the 3rd or 4th repetition I'd mess up. After a few of rounds of this I would find myself really focusing on the problem - homing in on the bit that required extra attention with a laser focus.   This super-focusing is actively cultivated in sports - I read about it as a means to increase batting success in the  US womens softball team.  Anyway, once I figured out how to apply this focus consistently the perfect repetitions would shoot up to 8 or 9.  Then there would be a few more go-arounds until I stopped myself thinking about the finish line. Then I'd try playing it within a larger section.  I did find in some cases, after I got one part to 10 reps I would have to repeat the process in the transition to the problem section... but in most cases I found I was now playing through the larger section consistently without errors.

So how did things work when I play through even longer parts or the whole thing?  So far so good - the errors haven't gone away entirely (some of the tricky bits are just hard for me to do) but they are definitely reduced, and more important, If I do make a mistake, focusing fixes the problem.  I don't know why it works - it could be that I've repeated it correctly enough times that muscle memory now remembers the right way, or that my brain unconsciously remembers to focus.  Regardless, it's looking like a technique I will add to my regular practice.

Guitar Doldrums...

Summer Oh Summer  (link to laid back summery music recorded on my phone - Sepia by Thierry Tisserand) - a great time to kick back and relax, do something a little different, maybe take a vacation... I had great plans for guitar this summer -  I thought I'd take a break from regular lessons and orchestra and pursue some of the things that I have no time for during the regular semester.  Even though I work at a university, my job doesn't change much inside and outside the semester, so doing something different with guitar, I figured, was a great way to change things up a bit and make some progress in new areas.   So I made a wish list of things to do:  attend several guitar camps (fun!), sign up for an online course to see what else I could learn outside of what I get from my teacher, get to grips with that Villa-Lobos piece that's been languishing for a year or so, figure out what modes are all about,  work on sight-reading (I am still abysmal at it), learn the new orchestra pieces in a leisurely manner so it's not a mad scramble at the last minute... not too much, right?

 So here I am taking stock.  Summer is almost over -  my son goes back to college next week - how am I doing? All started out well: I did indeed sign up for an online course for a month, and spent a pleasant few hours watching videos and getting ideas.  I did have a great time at a couple of guitar camps.  I even took a few lessons from a different teacher to get some new ideas... but after that I seemed to lose focus.  Got a bit sidetracked when I decided I should relearn some easy pieces (p.s. I'd like to be able to play Lagrima like that) I had forgotten so I could play them at the nursing home.  Got even more sidetracked deciding to learn some scales, then put that on hold as figured I needed feedback.  Gave up on the Villa-Lobos, again.  Abandoned modes after the course I signed up for turned out to be a bust (but wait, see recent progress in my other post!).  Started to work on the sight reading, decided the book I was working through moved too quickly so switched to a second book, which got lost under a pile of stuff...  Looked  at the orchestra pieces.   Hmmm.  Even worse, I don't really feel like working on any of the things that are lacking, so I'm not playing guitar much. I'm in guitar doldrums.  How did this happen???

Of course it's my own fault.  I'm a deadline kind of person - give me a deadline and I'll meet it, but I won't be energized to work on it until it's due.  Once I cut loose from lessons and orchestra all the deadlines went away, so my motivation to work on things that require actual 'work' went with it.  On the other hand, I seem to have managed the more pleasurable stuff (relearning pieces, camps, video viewing) just fine :)  And if summer is all about kicking back and relaxing, then perhaps it's OK.  After all, this is a hobby not work! But next summer  if I want to make actual progress,  I'll make sure to program in some deadlines...  As for curing the doldrums? First orchestra rehearsal is rapidly approaching, so I think I'd better get started.   And as for the rest?  I think I'll just enjoy the summer and just play what I feel like, when I feel like it, or not :)

I'm learning about modes! Slowly.....

This summer's project was learning about modes - what they are, how to use them, how to recognize them...  Thought I had it in the bag - signed up for a workshop at camp (5 successive days with 1.5 hour sessions) - surely I thought this would clarify that confusing mix of names, sounds scales and key signatures.  Sadly it didn't work out that way.   Pretty much all I learned from that 7 or so hours in class was that there is supposed to be lots of classical, pop and Irish music that is modal, and that Mixolydian, Dorian and Lydian are arguably the most common.  I had already read my music theory books on the topic and even tried to memorize them using my own silly acronyms - anyone for "I Don't Pat Little Minxes After Lunch"?   (well I never said I was any good at acronyms, though I do have to say I like my version of sharps in the circle of fifths - " Fat Cats Get Dizzy After Eating Bees"..... or in reverse for the flats- "Bad Elves and Dead Goblins Can't Fight").

Enough already.   I had pretty much forgotten about the topic after the disappointment of not having the explanation handed to me on a plate, when I happened upon Elliot Fisk's video on modes from the Boston guitar festival. What a revelation!  I'm very much a tactile/aural learner and seeing/hearing someone play a scale pattern for me is totally
different than looking at the pattern in a book.  Suddenly all that stuff about major and minor modes, added sharps and flats, and relating them to our regular major (Ionian) and minor (Aeolian) scales made total sense.  After a little experimentation, and reproducing the patterns on the guitar, I felt a lot more knowledgeable.  Of course I had only scratched the surface, and I still haven't watched the Fisk part 2, but that's next on my agenda.

Apart from the tactile/aural stuff, I also remember things better when I work them out for myself.  So I sat down and tried to make myself a summary....  I hope I got it right.

Major modes
                      Fingers                        Note!  all accidentals are with respect to the Ionian
Ionian           24 124 134                   Major  ( the interval of course being the major third)
Lydian          24 134 134                   Raised 4th  (If I forget, I can get it from the finger pattern)
Mixolydian  24 124  124                  Flat 7

Minor modes                                    Note!  All accidentals with respect to the Aeolian
Aeolian        134 134 13                    Natural minor (such a simple pattern :))
Dorian         134 13 - stretch-4  13    Raised 6th.  (My favorite.  And I'm never going to forget it now I saw Elliot Fisk talk about fingering it this way to make it tough and easy to remember)
Phrygian      124 134 13                    Flat 2. (Very recognizable sound...)
Locrian        124 124 13                    Flat 2 flat 5.   All I can say about this one is I'm glad it's rarely used.
And for completeness..
Harmonic minor
                    134 134 23                   Raised 7th to give the leading tone
Melodic minor
                    134 13-str-4 23            Raised 6 and 7 on the way up only.

Next challenge was to figure out how to tell if your music is modal.
Took me a bit of head scratching but I came up with this...

First figure out if its major or minor by checking the key sig.
Let's take a key sig with two sharps, F# and C# for demonstration purposes.   We know it's usually either D major or B minor and can tell which by the tonal center (or for me anyway, what note/chord it finishes or starts on).  If it starts on B, fine, its Bm.  If it also has consistent accidentals such as A# a raised 7th, then it's probably  the harmonic minor ... or perhaps G# and A# for melodic... IOW we are in our regular minor keys.

But what if the key sig is D, it starts and ends on D,  but there are flat C's throughout?   Compared with the parallel major (D major),  Mixolydian has a flat 7 (see above)  IOW the usual C# would be flattened to C natural.  Bingo! we are in D Mixolydian.

What if the piece has a key sig no sharps or flats, starts on A but then has F#  accidentals throughout? We know it's an A minor key because A minor key sigs have no sharps or flats.  Compared with the parallel minor, A Dorian has a raised 6th.  Which is F#.  So it's A Dorian.  I guess if was an Am key with a Bb throughout it would be A phrygian, and so on.  Similarly if it started on C with C major key sig (no sharps or flats) but had F# throughout it would be C Lydian.

What about the reverse?  How do we decide on a key signature for A Dorian for example? We take the key sig for A minor, (no sharps or flats) and then add F# accidentals.   To check we can ask ourselves, what is the major scale of which A is the second note?    Well G of course, and G major has the F#.

So having worked all that out, I feel like I've made major progress.
Then I got talking to some acoustic guitar friends - you know - play fantastically by ear but theory is another language.  Their point was, well, who cares?  no-one actually uses it, right? "Name me some recognizable songs that are Dorian", they say.  Indeed I cannot.  However a quick google search comes up with some possibilities - A Horse with No Name, by America, Mad world by Tears for Fears, Scarborough Fair by Simon and Garfunkel.  (not to mention Toccata and Fugue by JS Bach).  What?  Really?  I have the music for both Mad World (here's a recording I made a while ago) and Scarborough Fair...  so I check it out.   Yup - both have the key sig of A minor with F# accidentals throughout....raised 6th so they're in A Dorian.  I did get a bit confused at one point - there are some examples out there of A Dorian with an F# key sig and no accidentals, which had me going in circles to figure out what was going on.  I mean, you see an F# and you think G major or E minor right?  Then when it starts on D you kind of jump through hoops backwards trying to figure out what's going on. Much easier (and apparently the norm for the Church Modes)to notate modes in the same way as harmonic and melodic minor keys - use the key sig appropriate to the mode (major or minor)  and add accidentals pertinent to the mode.

Now recognizing the sound is going to be a whole other matter.....

Nails - trials and tribulations....

I have not paid much attention to all the anguished posts about nails, fake nails, filing nails, nail shape etc recently.  Not that I don't care, it's just that I seemed to be doing OK - providing I took care to keep them smooth, my nails stayed the same length and the tone I was getting worked for me ( and apparently my teacher, though it is possible he was just holding his comments while I dealt with more egregious problems).  Then in April I was doing some plumbing _ um, that's a fancy term for clearing a blocked sink - and I put my right hand down the drain to dig around.   I know it should have been the other hand, or even a tool,  but hindsight is a terrible thing.  Anyway, the inevitable happened - my water-softened i finger lost a huge chunk of nail.  This was especially bad because our final orchestra performance was coming up in May and there was no way it would grow back in time.

Desperate times call for desperate measures in the shower

What to do?   I was pretty convinced I wasn't going to use toxic glues that would soak into the nail and reduce it to the consistency of tissue paper.     Then I found some great self-stick nails - (KISS brand, - not the other ones which are soft, thick, sound awful and won't stay on).  Easy to stick and shape, produce great tone and the glue is kind of rubbery and rolls off when they eventually start to separate from the underlying nail a day or three later (they do come off if you get them wet though, so showering requires innovative finger covers - fingers chopped off rubber gloves with elastic bands worked well).  Yes I kept them on for a few days each time and kept replacing them.  As I said, hindsight is a terrible thing.  So I got through the orchestra performance fine (at least as far as nails went) - each time the stick-ons came off however, I found it necessary to smooth out the underlying nail quite a lot.  I didn't pay much attention until a couple of months had gone by and I STILL had no nails (I was actually using the stick-ons on 2 nails at this point because I had gone to town with the file on my m finger too).  Then it occurred to me what was happening - the real nail was getting chopped up on the underside of the fake nail so I was smoothing out any growth each time I changed the fake nail.  Duh.   Once I realized this I decided I would have to go fake-nail free and just tough it out until they grew back.

A few weeks later  - now we are in July, yikes! -  it was apparent this wasn't working so well either.   Problem being I wear my nails down at roughly the same rate as they grow. If they are at the right length that's fine - a gentle smoothing with micromesh paper (really you should use it, it's the best!) and occasional shaping does the trick. Now though, as soon as they started to get long enough to catch slightly on the guitar strings - that's the length they stayed.   More interventions required.  I figured taping them while practicing might work, but darned if I couldn't get anything to stick.  I didn't have any nails to wrap painters tape (as suggested by David Russell in his tips for guitarists ) along the edge, so it had to be something that would stay stuck over my entire finger ends.   Here's what didn't work - painters tape, athletic tape, scotch tape, electrical tape...

Paper tape

I was at my wits end until I remembered surgical paper tape (the 3M brand works well).
I discovered this miracle product when I needed something to protect skinned feet inside sweaty

carbon fiber speed-skating boots.  Stays on in the shower too. And turns out it will stay on finger ends for a guitar practice session, just about.  Can't say much for the tone but sacrifices have to be made...  A couple of weeks later I am rewarded with some white ends on my nails - yes- they are slowly growing back!

Hurrah! Growing at last

The problem now that there is a small amount of nail, the paper tape is wearing through at the nail and has to be replaced, sometimes more than once, during a practice session.  However as I can finally see progress, (I soon won't be able to type with my right hand again), I shall persevere - hopefully soon they will be long enough to switch to painters tape wrapped over the nail ends, and maybe, just maybe, I will have nails again by the time I resume my regular lessons in the fall,  5 long months after the plumbing incident. Would I use the stick-ons again?  In a heartbeat to save a performance, but they're coming right off afterwards!!!

What about products to increase nail strength?   I honestly can't say.  I spent a whole year painting onymyrrh on my cuticles and it was during the time I had good nails,  though I had good nails before and after too.  It's really hard to say given the long delay between using it and the treated nail reaching the business end.  In any case I knocked the bottle over and it's now off the market (though you can get straight myrrh from Amazon if you want to give it a try).  I do notice that taking biotin makes my nails grow faster.  I wasn't sure, so I stopped taking it, and my nails seemed almost to stop growing - so started taking it again and then had to start clipping non-guitar nails again, so that's a yes.  Nail hardening polish?  doesn't work for me either - seems to encourage chipping and breaking instead of bending and staying intact. So currently apart from the paper tape, I'm sticking with biotin and general hand and nail cream.  And I've given up cleaning sink drains for good!