Be careful what you ask for... you might get it

Recently I became convinced I'm not really moving forward with the guitar - the graph on left refers to how new technology gets adopted, but it serves my purpose quite well.  Yes, I made great progress for a while  (making me think I would be playing ~Asturias in a few short years), but now I think I'm in the "trough of disillusionment", where it seems quite likely this is as good as it's going to get.   Yes I am learning new pieces, and maybe they are getting a mite more difficult, but to my ears they don't really sound any better than those I learned last year.   I know this isn't for want of being told what to do (I am fortunate in having an amazing guitar teacher), but perhaps I've been selectively ignoring the advice that I need to become a better player.  So I asked my guitar teacher - what was preventing me from moving forward?...What do I need to do? It's not like I don't practice...

His response was something to the effect that I wasn't going to like the answer!  I think I have probably added my own interpretation, but this is what I took away from that conversation...

1. Significant improvement involves a lot of hard work, not just reaching a stage where I could play a piece through without too many mistakes, and then moving on.  I would probably have to work on something for many months to "finish" a piece.
2. I needed to learn pieces I didn't particularly like so as to teach me specific skills rather than - or in addition to -  pieces I just liked the sound of.
3. I was trying to do too many things to make significant progress in any one area.
4. Did I mention it was going to be hard work?

Phew!   Well I did ask...

As a result I'm trying to pay attention to what I'm being told rather than doing just enough to  'kinda' get it. I'm spending less time just "playing through"  piece and more time working on small parts and individual skills. This might involve working on one measure slowly for days or weeks, perhaps to master a a tricky fingering, stop the bass, add dynamics or separate out the melody.  It may even be starting to change the way I practice...  It's going to take me a few more helpful hints from my guitar teacher before I truly start thinking about this differently, but I like to imagine I might soon embark upon the "slope of enlightenment"

Did you know?  A bunch of flamingoes is a "flamboyance"

Learning to relax: why is it so hard?

I have absolutely no problem relaxing - just sit me down on the sofa with a glass of wine and I guarantee I'll be so relaxed I might even fall asleep.   However put me in charge of a guitar and ask me to play it, while remaining relaxed, and I have absolutely no idea how to do it.  We all get tense when we are doing something unfamiliar, but you would think after a few thousand tries I might have figured this out by now.  No such luck.

I’ve got lots of excuses – lack of flexibility so I need pressure required to keep my fingers in place, unfamiliar hand/arm positions, and of course, how much does it matter anyway?
But maybe the biggest reason is I don’t know what it feels like to truly relax, I pretty much always play tense. However recently while working on some Carlevaro octave shifting exercises I managed to relax on my way up the fretboard (aided and abetted by gravity).  I actually experienced what relaxing my left hand feels like. Wow! My arm/hand movement was much easier and more fluid.  

However incorporating this into general playing is still not easy.  Perhaps it's because I have always assumed that relaxing was an absence... ie "don't tense up"!   Then while reading Daniel Nistico's email newsletter, I noticed that he talks about actively relaxing - in other words it's something you actually have to make an effort to do! This may seem like semantics, but there seems to be a big difference between trying NOT to tense up vs. trying TO relax  - in fact it was my guitar teacher telling me to actively relax various fingers that resulted in me experiencing 'that relaxing feeling'.  As a first step to incorporating this into my playing, whenever I'm having difficulty I'm stopping what I'm doing to see if I have too much tension and can manage to relax something. Perhaps not surprisingly it often works.

How can failing possibly be good for you?

In common with many others, I hate screwing up.  In fact I go out of my way to avoid it at all costs, even if it involves a bunch of hard work to ensure I'm thoroughly prepared.   Seems to work well enough for most things, but not, apparently, for classical guitar.  One of the things I'm repeatedly told is that to get more confidence when performing, you have to practice performing - even if it's just for your teacher, your mom, or your friends: do lots of performances!  So I've been trying.   At one time I used to play for the Alzheimer's unit at a local nursing home and it really seemed to help,  but I had to give that up when my arm got injured. Since then, it seems I'm right back to square one on performance nerves.   So in an attempt to get more performance practice, this week I tried to play the piece I've been working on at an online masterclass.  Quel disaster!   Took me 3 attempts to get started,  and once I did, I fumbled my way through a mixture of wrong and missed notes that bore only the slightest resemblance to the piece I was trying to play.  What happened? The piece was by no means finished, but it should have been presentable enough to allow suggestions for improvement.  Not exactly an encouraging start to my resolution to practice performing 😟

 I came away from that with the usual negative self-talk -  everything from "What a complete fool I looked!"  to   "I'll never be able to do this - what was I thinking?"   Also tried to forget it, fast.   But maybe there's another way at looking at these apparent disasters. I recently read about an ivy league college offering advice on how to fail successfully because so many of the super-smart students have never actually had the experience of failing and they need to be taught how to cope. Then there's research on what makes kids more resilient  (AKA how do they bounce back from failures? - a mix of intrinsic and learned traits).  Turns out the way we respond to failure is all-important. The question is, can adults who are used to being competent and successful learn to bounce back better when things implode? I certainly hope so!   Of course, it's not exactly a disaster for me if I fail to play the guitar successfully for someone - and honestly, it probably makes not a bit of difference to my life in general.   So perhaps that's the first thing to take away - put it in context!  And when I didn't play well there's a fair chance that others waiting their turn to play were not thinking how foolish I was, but instead breathing a sigh of relief that they didn't have to follow a great performance...   (And if they were thinking how foolish I was, shame on them!)   But really the best way to follow up this episode was suggested by my guitar teacher.  What could I learn from this experience?  What set me on the wrong track to start with?  What should I do differently? What do I need to practice?

So instead of trying to blank out the bad performance, I tried to figure out what happened. Looking back I can see I did a bunch of things wrong.  Right from the beginning I got on the wrong track - First, my short scale guitar was temporarily out of action with new strings so I switched to my 650 - a guitar I haven't played for a couple of months - and proceeded to miss notes left right and center.  Take away?  Obviously I need more time to adapt if I'm going to switch between the 2.   Then I only got to warm up for about 2 minutes because I was watching other people play.  Duh.  I know I can't play when I'm not warmed up, so I need to make sure I allow time to do that before I'm called on to play.  Finally I got rattled when things went wrong right at the beginning. This I need to work on - a strategy for calming down and resetting when I get stressed out.  I don't think I can take anything away from the performance apart from that - the weak areas were no weaker than usual, it was simply I was struggling through in a state of increasing panic because nothing was working.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that practicing failing is a good idea 😉  but maybe when it happens we can look upon the experience more positively.  For more ideas, check out these strategies for coping with adversity from the American Psychological Association.

On NOT speeding up, immediately after you can play it slowly... Maria Luisa in progress

I have to admit it.  I'm not a patient person.  Despite my best intentions, I'm always speeding up a piece before I can really play it.  Not to mention running the whole thing instead of just practicing the difficult bits.  I know this is not the way to do it, and indeed for the last few pieces I've made a definite attempt to get more focused, stop, and slowly concentrate on the bits that are eluding me.  I'm still only partially successful though. I practice it slowly until I get it, then speed it up and sometimes it works at tempo, sometimes it doesn't.  Last week my guitar teacher pointed out a part I had practiced slowly but it was still hit or miss on the play-through. He gave me the instruction to practice it slowly and NOT to speed it up for the whole week.  Well, a whole week is a long time (!) but I did manage not to speed it up for several days, and lo and behold, I can now play it quite reliably.    So this was something of a revelation - (Duh, you might say).  I actually needed to continue to play it slowly for many more repetitions before speeding it up.   Hmmmm.  So maybe that's why my slow practice isn't working so well.  So to test this theory I'm going to go back to some of the problem parts in Maria Luisa by Sagreras (as evidenced in the video - there are quite a few of those!) and run them slowly until they are thoroughly ingrained... and when I can finally play the notes reliably I will be able to start adding the dynamic variations - I know,  experts say they should be there at the beginning, but I'm still at a stage where one thing at a time works best.

My new favorite guitar-oriented objects...

These may not look much like guitar accoutrements, but nevertheless they are on my list of necessities.  Having alternately ignored, nursed, therapized (is that a word?) and even stopped playing in the hope of defeating tennis elbow, I had been prepared to consider anything!  It turns out yet  another benefit of classical guitar summer school was meeting with other amateur guitarists and swapping stories.  One of those came from MC, who told me the incredible story of having cured a painful case of tennis elbow in 6 weeks by diligently exercising with these rubber tubes.  I was somewhat skeptical, having been trying to conquer it (admittedly mostly while still playing the guitar) for the last 9 months, but as I said, as needs must, I'll try anything.  Accordingly I purchased the 2 easiest tubes (yellow is the softest) and started to follow instructions, which involve gripping the tube so it is twisted then slowly releasing the twist with the affected arm.  More instructions  here.

One of my concerns was that when I first started to do the exercise, even though the tennis elbow had settled at lot, doing the exercise was painful, and in the aftermath my arm was definitely aggravated.  And at the physical therapist I had been instructed to protect the arm - in fact, I was told not to reach out for things or put extra strain on it in any way.  Yet here I was doing the exact motion that stressed that common extensor tendon.   I checked with MC and with one of the professional guitarists at the summer school (how common is this injury, anyway?) and they both said - "yep, it hurts to start with, but persevere".  So I did.  It's now been 2 weeks, and surprisingly, things have started to improve.   My arm is not yet healed - it is still stiff when I take it off the guitar after holding it in one position for a while, so I make sure I stop every 10 minutes or so and stretch it out (using active stretches, as instructed by the PT).  But now I can grip and use my arm in ways I haven't done since before I damaged it with very little pain.  And I've graduated from the yellow tube to the red tube.  Yes it still hurts when I do the exercise (probably 2 or 3 on 10-point scale) but after stretching the soreness settles down quickly, and in fact it usually feels better after exercising.

Not that I'm just doing the exercise - it's a no-holds-barred effort to get totally healed before orchestra season starts again.  In addition to doing the tube-twists,  I make sure my arm is well warmed up before I start practicing the morning  (literally- I either dunk it in the hot wax bath and wrap it or use a microwaveable heat pad while I eat breakfast), I take frequent breaks to do active stretches (dorsal and ventral flexion), I don't practice for more than 45 minutes at a stretch, and I ultrasound it with a cheap but effective unit before retiring for the night.   So if all continues well, in another month or so....I'll be done.  wish me luck!

Classical Guitar Summer School for Adults: a Review

I've now recovered (and more or less got over withdrawal symptoms) from attending my first Classical Guitar "camp" (so named Summer School) organized by Simon Powis of ClassicalGuitarCorner.com

What a fantastic experience!  I've spent vacations at folk camps, acoustic guitar camps, and even a catchall crafts/social conscience/arts camp in pursuit of my guitar hobby before, but this was my first classical guitar camp.   Actually that's not surprising - I'm not sure there are many are available for adults as opposed to summer camps for kids.   Other folk camps are arranged around workshops or seminars that are either on a one-off basis or repeated daily with the same teacher over the course of the camp;  in some ways classical guitar camp was the same, and in others entirely different.

What was the same?  It took place at a college (the picturesque Endicott College)  during summer recess, and the accommodation was in the dorms.  However in this case we had the choice of a private bath, which was nice even though the dorms were the usual variety of basic. Meals in the college cafeteria were included - and the food was actually pretty good, with lots of options that included real vegetables not cooked for hours and choices that didn't include "fast food" franchises. Another similarity was great concerts given by faculty in the evenings, and it was especially nice for early risers because they started at 7pm allowing time afterwards to socialize without burning the midnight oil. There were also a daily seminar - topics appeared to be largely determined  by the teaching faculty  - for instance there was a great presentation on guitar music written by contemporary Australian composers (including excerpts of the pieces) given by one of the teachers, Janet Agostino.   Speaking of teachers,  there was an outstanding line-up of teachers including Raphaele and Janet Agostino from Oz, Ben Verdery and Gohar Vardanyan from New York, Dave Belcher from N. Carolina and of course, Simon Powis from New York.  They expended an enormous amount of effort coaching us in our ensemble pieces and working with us in our individual lessons, in addition to giving us great concert performances.

What was different?  Well it was classical guitar after all - not so much jamming, more sight reading.😳   We were all assigned to ensembles at one of 5 different levels on the first day,  and spent the 5 days learning 3 ensemble pieces and 2 pieces for the entire orchestra, none of which we had seen before, for a performance on the last night.  In other words, over 3 hours of rehearsals a day plus a lot of practicing (!)  We also got 2 private lessons with the teachers where we could present a piece we were working on.  All in all we were playing or practicing many many hours every day - (perhaps not the best thing for a recovering tennis elbow - but you only live once...).   And did I mention the student "open mic" night?   What a blast!  This was not a 'seriously let's present a classical piece'  such as you might find at your local classical guitar society open mic night.  Indeed, people not only played classical pieces, but also presented their other guitar lives,  and my were there some great performances!  There were original compositions, singing, duets,  other guitar genres...  you just didn't know what to expect but it was all good!  About half the attendees presented something, and I think it might have been my favorite evening except I was on edge all night because I was almost the last to present.  (Of that, we will say little, except that I didn't collapse and it was a very very long way from perfect.) Despite the stress,  many of us were talking about getting together to play duets so we could perform them at camp next year... I've already got a piece picked out and a new guitar-buddy to practice with.    Other great things?  We had a guitar-oriented stretching seminar given by Simon's wife, the Lindy Hop dancer, Evita.  To be honest, we would have liked that every day given the amount of practicing we did! And Simon arranged a special BBQ next to the beach right after the final performance. Simon also arranged a Q and A session - from the students to the teachers - that everyone can hear in a podcast.

What did I like most?
When I got back, I was asked by my guitar teacher what I liked most about the camp.  The short answer is that I really liked meeting, interacting with and working together with other classical guitar learners towards a common goal.  Most of us are not so young, and maybe the last time we had such an experience was way back when in college.  Learning classical guitar is after all so often a solitary hobby.  However none of that would have been possible without a wonderful camp framework and committed teachers recruited by Simon, and the mutual support and encouragement of a camp attendees - we see it on Simon's ClassicalGuitarCorner.com website and it was amply demonstrated when we met in person.

What, if anything, would I change?
I will sign up again in heartbeat if it's exactly the same as this year.  Personally I would prefer fewer ensemble pieces to learn, and maybe more technique-oriented workshops.  Although there was no scheduled down-time, I wouldn't change that - I personally skipped one of the talks to take a break, but that was when it fit my schedule and interests.

Goals for next year?
If I wasn't convinced before, I'm convinced now.  I need to learn to sight read.  I'm on a mission. Also this year wasn't the best for me for presenting a piece either for a lesson or a performance - my enforced rest beforehand meant I really hadn't prepared, and of course the stage fright was there in force.  I'm determined next year will be different.  I'm definitely going to start taking opportunities to perform in addition to practicing in my room.

BTW if you want to see what we managed to make of 5 pieces in 5 days - Simon has posted them, plus many pictures,  on his CGC facebook page.  And if this kind of experience appeals to you, I couldn't recommend it highly enough...  already can't wait for next year!

Classical guitar camp coming up - I can't wait!

Pic from CGC Summer School

To say I'm excited is an understatement!   In a week's time I'll be in Massachusetts at the start of my first classical guitar camp organized by Simon Powis from NYC.   This is not his first camp, though I believe it will be his first in the US (he hails from Australia).  I've attended Folk camps and larger craft/music/social camps with my guitar before - and they are a great deal of fun (where else can you play along with everything from lap dulcimers to washboards?)  However this is a totally new animal, and something of a challenge to boot -  all week we get to practice in ensembles ( a small one geared to our playing ability and a large ensemble consisting of everyone) for a performance at the end of the week.  Yikes!  I'm used to having a couple of months to get proficient in ensemble music.  I can only hope that everyone else is much better at sight reading than I am and will cover for my lapses.  In addition, of course, concerts by the faculty (Simon Powis, Gohar Vardanyan, Ben Verdery, Raphaele and Janet Agostino and David Belcher), plus workshops and the opportunity to do an open stage performance.   What a treat! [Except for participation in the open stage performance, which will not include me, although I am intending to be ready to do it next year, honestly...]

Pic from CGC summer school

Naturally I'm a bit worried that I haven't been able to practice the orchestra music because of my arm,  (we don't know which parts we are playing in any case). I'm even more worried that we are supposed to have prepared 2 pieces for a private lesson.    When I signed up for this, I obviously didn't know I'd be out of action for a couple of months right beforehand.  I can only marvel at the amount I forgot in 2 short months of not playing.  It remains to be seen whether I manage to claw something back (without stressing my arm) or plead incompetence and sit that one out.

Visesnut with cover

What I am going to do is take my new guitar ...  I'm not even thinking about what a Southwest commuter hop might possibly do to it - though I do expect it will be well protected in my spiffy Christmas-present Visesnut case.  I now have guitars in 3 different sizes so it's good that the case adjusts to fit the guitar - I would most definitely not want to cart it around in the very solid but exceptionally heavy case it came in!

Endicott college dorms

I probably should be more worried about the accommodations - dorm style beds might well be great for teenagers, but I'm not so sure about those of us who have advanced quite a few years since!  And I don't even have the option of packing a foam mattress, like I did last time I did the dorm thing.   Assuming I survive the experience,  I will definitely be reporting on the accommodations as well as everything else when I get back!

In the meantime I have a couple of lectures to prepare.  Stay tuned...