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!

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!