Small is beautiful

I might have been talking about my new (to me) romantic guitar, but I'm not.   Instead, more on practicing.  It's so easy for frustration to set in when learning something new.  Try it, try it again.  Almost get it.... Nope it's gone again.   Seems to be the story of my life right now. It's not like I'm not practicing, though admittedly having a furry friend has cut into guitar time somewhat.  So I started thinking about the way I practice. My morning routine involves working through a list of technical exercises as a warm up, taking the dog for a walk,  eating a quick breakfast, then back to the guitar for a bit before heading out to work.  Invariably the dog is nosing at the guitar before I finish the technical exercises and the shorter days mean I have less and less time to practice after the walk.  At least that is my excuse for the fact that I'm still making the same mistakes and having the same problems today that I was having at the beginning of the week.  Each day I start, I fumble, I work at it until it comes right, then move onto the next thing.  And then I realized that I am so focused on getting through everything that I am not taking the time to properly practice things that are not working.

So today I did something different: I worked on only small sections of the technical stuff (but stayed with them a lot longer).  I picked only one or 2 measures of pieces to work on and forced myself to think about them, check the sheet music, then play them in slow motion to see why I was still making mistakes.  What happened? For one of the measures I was working on I ended up changing position and fingering allow me to fret a part I've been having problems with.   And in the shifting exercise I've been struggling with, I noticed that my hand snugs up against the guitar neck much better when shifting relaxed than shifting tense.  Huh? Have to explore this more, but maybe it will help me a) find the notes at the other end of the shift and b) recognize if my hand is relaxed or not (believe it or not, unless I stop and think I really can't tell).

Moral of the story?  make it small and take it slowly,...