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!

Update on Practice Log... August 2016

A few weeks ago I finally decided that some sort of log would help me practice - so I came up with a simple system of a list - with check marks each day if I actually practiced it.  This turned out to be great for...

• making sure I was working on everything I really wanted to work on - it became painfully obvious when I missed a few days, or more, of things I didn't enjoy that much (like sight reading, to name my No. 1 personal bugbear).
• making myself stop to think about what I wanted to practice and how to practice it, particularly if it involved breaking down a technique into smaller parts.  Like for tremolo, listing all the different options for finger sequence or emphasis.

However, what it wasn't so good at was giving me distinct goals for each task and tracking progress.  Hmmm.   I'm thinking some refinement is in order.  Now I'm still not going to start tracking this in spreadsheets and analyzing statistical variation (I'd  never hear the last of it if my husband found me doing that!) but I have slightly modified my minimal method.  In addition to the list of practice items I now have added a second, shorter list of larger goals for the week.  For instance, this week I listed - do tremolo on second string with walking bass at 120,  play first 2 lines of "promise" in time but at a slow tempo with metronome ( note tempo reached),  figure out fingerings and frets for G3 "Granada,"  finish C major section (V position) in sight reading book.  

Already this seems to be keeping me better focused, and hopefully by the end of the week I will actually have a benchmark in each of these areas.  The downside is that I seem to have forgotten to fill out the checkmarks since I did this... However I'm hoping it may not be necessary.  Having a general goals list seems to be keeping me on track, and the process of figuring out the practice items and writing them down at the beginning of the week informs how I actually practice.  Time will tell...