Free E-Newsletters: are they worth your time?

Free E-Newsletters: are they worth your time?

I have a lot of respect for music professionals who take the time to share their expertise with us through free e-newsletters. OK they are often a marketing tool for subscription courses, but that doesn't take away from the fact that they can be very valuable resources.  Even if we are fortunate enough to take regular guitar lessons from a pro, we are unlikely to be exposed to the resources available to a music major, not to mention the learning that comes by way of studying with like minded musicians.  These newsletters usually link to blogs from guitar professionals, and provide a lot of useful information.

So here are my top 5:

I really like the posts by Noa Kageyama on bulletproofmusician.com   He is actually a violinist but teaches performance psychology at Juilliard, as such most of his posts relate to practice, memorization and performance.  I particularly appreciate that his posts are all based on published research.

You should also check out Simon Powis' Classicalguitarcorner.com   He has links to instructional materials, podcasts (usually interviews with famous guitarists) and some of the videos and other materials from his lessons.  He is an engaging speaker and well worth a look.

Another good site is Bradford Werner's Thisisclassicalguitar.com  He also has some instructional videos, but a lot of his links are to the latest youtube postings by excellent guitarists - a great place to check out who is up and coming in the guitar world.

Speaking of instructional videos - if you are on the stringsbymail mailing list you will get links to the latest instructional videos by Gohar Vardanian at www.stringsbymail.com/videos/ .  Impressive!

Finally and on a different note, have a look at Tommasilo Zillio's Musictheoryforguitar.com  Not really classical  - he plays electric and ot can be a bit annoying to plough through some of his promotional material but he has some good videos. I recently viewed one on improvising using sixths..

Happy Browsing!

How I found the right teacher

This really goes back to when I first decided to learn guitar for real - after my spouse voiced the opinion that I should take lessons if I wanted to do 'it' properly.  I had this little video playing in my head from back when I was doing an externship overseas many years ago: we had so much fun hanging out with the guy with the guitar - the music was the magnet that pulled the students together. I wanted to be that person.   Fast forward a few decades to 3 years ago, and I had a guitar, and I wanted to learn.  For real.  So I looked online for a guitar teacher and found someone only a mile from where I live. Online reviews were positive and he actually said he took adult students. Great!  I carted my rather large steel string guitar to him and after suffering through the sore and bleeding fingers stage, applied myself to learning some tunes.  Though I didn't know much about guitars, I do know I don't have a great singing voice and I really love melodies, so I made it clear what I wanted.   To learn fingerstyle, fingerpicking, whatever it's called.   All started off well, he was a truly nice young guy who played in a local band, could definitely play melodies, and did his best.  The trouble was, his best was demonstrating how the melody sounded and asking me to do it.  If I was having trouble he told me to do it again.  I didn't get feedback on what I was doing wrong, how I should practice something, what I needed to do to fix things.  I consulted with my friends - what could be the issue?  I liked the guy but I didn't feel like he was teaching me anything I couldn't do on my own.  Perhaps he was nervous about actually telling me I was doing things wrong, they suggested.   "Just tell him it's OK to criticize".  So I did.  But nothing changed.   I had a lot of angst now - this wasn't what I wanted, I needed to move on, but I didn't want to hurt his feelings.  Looking back I realize this was silly - it was a business relationship and he wasn't a good fit for me. Nevertheless I chickened out and told him I needed to take a break, and looked for another teacher.

Next time around I checked in with a mom and pop "music school" about half an hour away.  Yes they had guitar teachers who taught fingerstyle.  I wondered - did they have someone older, with more experience teaching as opposed to just playing in a band?  Yes they did, if I didn't mind long hair.  Strange question I thought, but let's face it, I don't care what his hair looks like (yes it was a guy) providing he can teach guitar.   At first everything went well.  My new guitar teacher did indeed have very long hair, but more importantly had been trained in classical guitar at one time.  He was older, friendly, and did a much better job at teaching me basics, though admittedly in a somewhat haphazard fashion.  I learned what Giuliani arpeggios were,  began to learn a simple Beatles arrangement and felt I was making progress.  Then things started to go wrong.  My new teacher started to turn up for lessons without a guitar - OK he could demo on mine.  He was late, sometimes very late.  OK - I waited,  and he always made up the time.  Sometimes he seemed a bit spaced out and the black fingernail polish was weird -  but maybe that was just me.  Then one time he didn't turn up at all.  I wasn't happy having made the hour long round trip and I was fed up with not knowing what to expect...  I made my feelings known. I continued to go but yet again started looking for a new teacher.

Once again my husband chimed in.  "you know there's a proper music school in town - why don't you take lessons there?"  Well I had the answer for that.  "They only teach classical guitar and I don't want to learn classical it's too serious."  He persisted saying that I could just "get the basics" then return to fingerstyle when I had a good grounding.  I wasn't convinced, but signed up for adult group guitar lessons for beginners, which were heavily discounted so I didn't feel I had much to lose.  I was a little worried because I only had a steel string guitar, but the only prerequisite was a guitar of some sort and a footstool.  The lesson turned out to be really great.  There were 5 of us, and we started with the basics, including reading music, how to make the guitar sound sweet and how not to hurt our hands and wrists. I learned more in the first 2 lessons than I had in the previous 6 months.  The teacher could play like an angel, had an engaging personality, and more importantly, knew how to teach.  I enquired about private lessons, but as there were no vacancies till the next semester I continued with my private teacher.  However within a couple of months he again failed to show for a lesson, so  I called it a day.  This time I told him why I was quitting - I needed someone who was reliable - and I registered for classical lessons with the music school teacher.  Which turned out to be the beginning of the end of my acoustic playing.  My steel string got replaced with a classical.  Initially I still had the intention of switching back to steel string when I had mastered "the basics" but it turns out I may study for years and still not acquire them.  No mind - I am totally in love with the sound of the classical guitar, and am happy working towards making that kind of  music.   And I'm more than satisfied with my teacher, 2+ years later - he seems to take the outsized expectations and undersized abilities of adult students in his stride and still get them to make progress.  I look forward to my lesson every week and do my best not to screw up too badly.

So what do I take from this?
- Taking music lessons is a business relationship.  You might be friends with your teacher, but the bottom line is you are buying a service and that service has to meet your needs. If it isn't working, it may even be helpful to tell your teacher why it hasn't worked out for you - assuming you have a good relationship that is.

Your teacher has to have professional ethics - be dressed appropriately, polite, reliable and encouraging not punitive.

- You have to be comfortable with your teacher.  Personally I think you have to like them - as an adult there's a social component to taking lessons and I certainly wouldn't want to take lessons with someone I didn't like or respect, although I could see taking a few lessons with someone I didn't like if they were teaching me something I really wanted to know.  However, I doubt it would be a long term relationship.

- You have to be taught what you want to learn.  It's OK if learning something is a means to an end ( a lot of classical guitar seems to be like that) but guitar playing encompasses a huge number of genres and you're not likely to want to stick with it if it isn't meeting your musical needs.

- The bottom line is, the teacher has to be able to teach.  Some of the most brilliant players suck at teaching, whereas there are outstanding teachers who may not be destined for greatness.  I would pick the good teacher any day.  After all, I'm not destined for greatness either :)

Practice vs. playing classical guitar - my attempts at goal setting

I've never much thought about how to practice the guitar.  I've read about methods to make yourself practice, but I don't have that problem:  playing guitar is for relaxation and pleasure, a way to destress and take my mind off troubles, a way to get into 'flow.'  I play a lot in the gaps around work, eating and sleeping.  Sometimes instead of sleeping!  But wait, I read that practice is different from playing...  practice is goal-oriented, deliberate, requires metrics, logs and concentration, whereas playing is - well - just playing. Maybe even a waste of good practice time....   Excuse me?  that's beginning to sound like work!   I'm accustomed to just sitting down with the guitar and working on whatever I feel like at the moment,  or whatever is most pressing (like something for a lesson that's coming up). Though come to think of it maybe I am feeling that progress has stalled a little recently.  I seem to be having the same old problems with the same old things.  Maybe it is time to change things up a bit.

I'm not one of those people who obsessively logs progress. My other half takes his gps watch and plots speed, course and duration for every training run. He even has a waterproof watch to log laps in the pool and how many strokes per lap.   He has a spreadsheet with his progress over the last week, month year, and I've known him cancel a run when he can't find his Garmin - presumably because if he didn't log it, it didn't happen.  For me, just thinking about all that work makes me want to lie in bed and watch reruns of Downton Abbey.  However there is a lot of research indicating that setting concrete goals accelerates progress - (as a totally unrelated aside, my sister in law reminds me that concrete and cement are not one and the same).  So with lessons from my regular teacher on vacation, I decided to dip my toe in the water of goal-setting.

I started off by figuring out what I would like to accomplish over the summer. Naturally I would like to become a better guitar player, but that's like wanting to cure cancer: too big and too vague.  So I thought about some goals over the next few months and next year.  I tried to have a general goal, and then break it down into smaller specific goals.
1.  Improve sight reading -  a solid goal would be to the same level as would be required as the pieces I play.  My guitar teacher tells me this is not a short term goal but will take many months of daily practice.  He's the eternal optimist, whereas my cup is usually half empty, so I figure it will take me a year or more.
2. Learn to position-play.

I figured these 2 goals are interrelated.  I evaluated a number of resources aimed at sight reading and decided that the essence of sight reading was solid position playing.  Until I could do that, there was little chance of improving beyond the beginner level with sight reading because I was spending too much time trying to find the notes.  The book I came across that seemed the most logical to address that issue was 'progressive reading for guitarists' by Stephen Dodgson and Hector Quine.  Unlike other resources, it actually starts in position V, and at the beginning sticks strictly to one finger for one fret.  I like that because when you are just starting, if your hand gets out of position for a stretch it's hard to get it back in place accurately.  Also it's much easier to keep your hand stable in V without also dealing with the added stretch of first position.  After V it moves to IV, then I and II then back up to the higher positions.  Along the way it has some pretty tricky rhythm reading exercises including 32ths.  ( I might have to make myself count out 1-e-and-a 2-e-and- a to figure them out....).  My goal: at least get through positions I-V by the end of the summer.

3. I would like to be able to play a piece I shelved a year ago because I couldn't move around fast enough to fret it.   Obviously just trying to go faster isn't cutting it, so I need to work on techniques relating to accuracy and speed. On the basis of some excellent advice,  I'm working on exercises designed to facilitate speed and shifting.  Once I get them down I'm going to put a metronome on them and work on gradually ramping them up.  What are my specific goals? This is a hard one to quantify because I don't know what's possible for me and how long it will take.  My original goal was to play that piece at a reasonable speed by the end of the summer, however I have a feeling it will take longer than that to acquire the skills.  So my new goal is to memorize it and play it cleanly by the end of the summer.  I figure I can work on ramping up speed over a longer period.

4. I need more pieces I can play from memory.  I play for dementia patients at a nursing home once a week, and although they always seem to appreciate what I play, I've already played all the things I remember several times!   It takes me a long time to learn new pieces, so I figured the best way to accomplish this goal is to bring back simple pieces I used to play and have forgotten. I'll stick with each one until I get it,  play it at the nursing home, then move on to another.  I just got "Lagrima" back, so now I'm working on "Sepia" by Thierry Tisserand.

5. I want to be able to perform in casual settings without the stress causing me to crash and burn.   Playing at the nursing home has helped but I still blank out at some point pretty much every time.  I figure this needs 2 approaches: more performance practice, and learning pieces using more than muscle memory. Unfortunately that's hard work.  i.e. learn the right hand separately, learn the left hand separately, learn it so you can play it starting at every measure, visualize playing it without the guitar....    The easiest one of these for me is learning pieces so I can start them at any point, so as a start I will apply this to new pieces and to the pieces I am "pulling back." So far as more performance practice goes: I resolve to continue to accept other opportunities to play informally and head out into the park weather permitting.  There's only so much I can make myself do....

6.  Continue to improve the pieces I have recently learned to a level I can perform them at the nursing home.  Currently that's my Vals Primavera piece.

7. Learn orchestra pieces for the Fall

Yikes that's a lot of goals.  No wonder I don't make much progress on any one of them.  A little triage is necessary.  My priorities at this point are the position playing and speed, because improving those will probably have a major impact on the rest of my playing.  The orchestra stuff can wait till later.

So I have a list I make at the beginning of every week in a little notebook I keep next to my guitar: at the beginning of the month it looked a bit like this.

                                 6/1    6/2    6/3    6/4    6/5    6/6    6/7
Warm up
RH exercises
LH exercises
Giuliani speed
Dodgson
Vals
NH singalong
NH Sepia
VL arpeggios
VL harmonics

I'm not logging how many minutes I practice or describing in detail what I worked on.  The goal is simply to tick off what I practice each day in the appropriate column.  I don't expect to practice everything every day, but I do intend to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. If there is a gap on a line one day, then I try to make sure I practice it the next day.  For the speed piece once I can play it without mistakes (mostly) I will put in the tempo.  Wish me luck!

Overcoming performance anxiety with classical guitar: starting slowly

Overcoming Performance Anxiety

This is a major challenge - for me and many of my friends - later-in-life amateur classical guitar players.  We would love to be able to play for friends, for family, maybe at social gatherings ...   Most of us are too nervous to try, and if we did once step out of our comfort zone, the experience was so stressful perhaps we have decided it's not for us:  we will confine ourselves to playing in our living room for our own pleasure.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, but apart from hating to be defeated by anything, I feel I've lived long enough to want to give back in some way. No I can't play like a professional musician and never will, but I can play well enough to give others pleasure if I can just stop shaking and play for goodness' sake!

Despite the fact that I have no problem giving public talks, including at national venues, I am a poster child for guitar performance anxiety (and not in a good way).  It took me 2 years before I managed to play a short piece all the way through for my teacher.  I think I have read everything there is to read about overcoming the problem.  I even paid money for a dedicated course involving a lot of visualization - that one I gave up before making it through the first section so I can't comment on whether it would have worked.  I tried beta blockers (once - didn't help), asked my long-suffering guitar teacher to sit still during multiple (like 20) attempts to play (that didn't work either).  I had one disastrous attempt at an 'open mic' where I stopped and started about 6 times in a 2 minute piece and needless to say have not been back since. In fact, telling myself I could do it, meditative breathing, practicing in front of safe people (believe me, there are no 'safe' people!) - none of it worked.

There are lots of theories about why some adult amateur musicians have a crippling problem with performance anxiety. The one that feels right to me is that we are accomplished in our own fields, perhaps even acknowledged experts.   In our adult lives, we are rarely in a situation where we are beginners, being evaluated, corrected, perhaps failing to meet expectations.  We have a confidence in our performance built from experience and a track record of success.  However when playing the guitar, suddenly we are beginners again.  There is a fear of failure: of failing to live up to our own or others' expectations, of being judged and found inadequate...

The solution that is often recommended is just to keep doing it - keep trying to play the open mics until it becomes familiar and less stressful.  It's recommended enough that I'm sure it works for a lot of people.  Not me though - my one disastrous attempt at an open mic now looms large in my memory and merely thinking about it ramps up the fear. However, the concept of getting experience in a low-risk setting and gradually building a track record of success? ... I can see that having potential.  But what is a low-risk setting? Certainly not an open mic where people are sitting watching me play, complete with their expectations of being entertained.  Particularly not at the guitar society where the audience of guitar players know what the music is supposed to sound like and can pinpoint every mistake!  And not in my guitar lesson - because after all, the teacher's job is to point out weaknesses in our playing so we can improve - Let's face it however positive our teachers are, deep in our reptile brains we know exactly what's going on.  So I set myself to thinking where I could start...

I started small. My idea was just to play in a public place - merely in the presence of people who were going about their business.  So I sat on a park bench in our local park and played to myself for half an hour.  Not many people about and no-one paid any attention.  So far so good.  I repeated the process a couple of times with similar results, so figured, yes I could do that - it was just like practicing in a different setting. The problem now was that it was tooooo quiet - there weren't enough people...   While pondering this problem (on a bench where I had been playing) someone I hadn't noticed came up to me and said they worked in a nursing home and would I play for the Alzheimers patients in an informal setting?  She said they liked quiet peaceful music.  In fact they often respond to music when other interventions had failed.  I promised I would think about it.  I pondered it over the next week or so and eventually came to the conclusion that it was about as low a risk setting as I could ask for.   I didn't know anyone there, the patients were not in a position to criticize, and expectations (of me) were not high.  I didn't have that much I could play from memory, but I assumed I could play the same things over.  And the worst that could happen was that I wouldn't be asked back.  So I turned up with my guitar and lots of advice from my guitar teacher - principally "go slowly, REALLY slowly!" and a number of easy pieces that theoretically I could play without making too many mistakes.  It turned out to be in a small recreation room with patients lined up in their wheelchairs, some sleeping, some being attended to by nurses.  At first I was all nerves, but faced with the expectant faces of a few of the old-timers I just kept going -  past the mistakes, restarting when I got lost and making it a goal to keep going because I simply was not going to walk out. In the end I calmed down somewhat and managed to play for about 35 minutes.  Certainly not a command performance or one I could be proud of musically.   When I packed up my guitar I expected the activities person to say "thank you for coming, we'll call you". But surprisingly they asked when I could come back, and a couple of the patients thanked me and said what beautiful music....

That first time it took me several hours for my heart rate to get back to normal so I could process the experience, but eventually I began to get a positive feeling about it.  Yes I had screwed up, multiple times, but I had continued playing and survived.   Several people seemed to like it.  No-one pointed out the mistakes or suggested I would do better next time. In fact the appreciation seemed genuine.  So when I went back the next week, it was with the knowledge that I had done it once, so I could darn well do it again.  Yes I still made lots of mistakes, but the stress level was just a little bit less. By the 5th time, the stress was -almost- manageable and even the mistakes were becoming marginally less frequent (I was playing mostly the same things over so now I had practiced performing them several times). And I was looking forward to seeing some of the patients - would the old gentleman who used to be a violin player participate?  Nowadays he can only raise his hands and bob them up and down in time with the music - in perfect time mind you.  Would the old ladies recognize some of the songs and start to sing along again? - I've taken to interspersing strumming and singing old time songs with the classical music.  I don't have much of a singing voice, but I can hold a tune enough to get them singing.  And the way I feel about it has changed  - I feel like I'm actually contributing something rather than putting myself out there.  In other words it's about them not about me and that makes all the difference.

What I've learned by this experience is that when I can screw up, I can continue playing and it will be OK.   Absolutely no-one there is counting mistakes, and I get another chance to go back next week and try again! I've had lots of experience playing through major distractions - beeping of monitors, alarms going off, someone pushing their walker right in front of me while I'm trying to play, or yelling out questions at me in the middle of pieces.  I've learned that I really have to know some of the music far better than I do currently to be able to continue seamlessly when I get distracted.  Maybe I'll finally do what my guitar teacher says to get things more firmly lodged in my memory! Most importantly I have started down the road to developing a track record of success that I hope will build my confidence so that if someone says "play something for us" I actually say yes...

 (Pablo Picasso) "Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone"

How it all started

I'm probably typical of many who decide to learn the guitar later in life:   some music instruction as a kid - a few years piano, recorder in school, nothing serious.  And I've tried to learn guitar on my own before - twice in fact - and gave up each time after expending a couple of months of effort and learning to strum a few chords.  Then life took over and the demands of career and raising a family banished all thoughts of learning a musical instrument.

Fast forward a few decades.  Children are all grown up and I suddenly find myself with spare time and more importantly, energy.  Even then it's not so much that I had been just waiting to learn an instrument. It happened almost by accident - clearing out a closet I found my son's (unused) strumstick - https://strumstick.com/pages/history-of-the-strumstick  -a neat little instrument super easy to play.
As he showed some interest in singing I once thought (wrongly as it turned out) it would get him into music. Anyway I picked it up, and immediately got sucked into figuring out how to play it - which led to me remembering how I wanted to learn to play guitar, and a few weeks later that led to my first guitar purchase on the electronic Bay.
By this time in my life, I thought I needed all the help I could get, so I purchased a used steel string acoustic advertised specifically as being super easy to play. I knew so little I didn't know to even find out the important things - the size of the guitar, the shape of the neck, the width of the fingerboard, whether there were semi-fatal structural issues or whether it would even stay in tune! Looking back, I count myself lucky that I actually ended up with a guitar in good condition that stayed in tune and was moderately easy to play.   What's certain is I could have made a better choice for a first guitar had I taken some advice, but I guess that's all part of the learning curve. Take it from me, if you're a beginner, talk to some people who know about acoustic guitars before charging out and buying one; hold and attempt to fret a variety before you purchase one; and definitely do not purchase a guitar sight unseen online.  Even if you can't talk to anyone in person, sign up to join the acousticguitarforum.com -  a fantastic resource for all things guitar. Thousands of subscribers and lots of advice (and opinions) for beginners on everything from making a guitar, to how to choose a guitar, what to look for when buying a guitar, and even basic music theory.  And in my experience a good place to buy a guitar too.  Anyway I don't even have a picture of that first guitar, within a few months it was replaced by a sweet little martin that stayed with me for about a year.  Yes, a year later I was still playing guitar... And for that I can credit my long-suffering non-musical husband.  "If you really want to learn to play you have to take lessons" he said.  You might be wondering at this point if I have got my guitars mixed up - a martin is not a classical after all - stay tuned for more on my lesson Odyssey.