My Marcus Dominelli guitar

 630's ...  Dominelli on the right

Well I managed it: a month of extremely limited guitar playing followed by an entire month without using my left hand on the guitar at all.  Quite an achievement, if I say so myself.

The most notable results of this seem to have been that I have totally forgotten anything I ever knew how to play on the guitar, and my finger-ends hurt. Oh and the pain in my arm is much improved, but sadly not totally gone.  To be honest, if I didn't have classical guitar camp coming up in just over a week, I'd probably let it sit a bit longer, but there's ensemble music to prepare, so very gingerly, I've picked up the guitar and am working on small segments.

Actually it's the perfect stuff to practice on - nothing too challenging to fret, and I can practice sight reading too.  So long as my arm doesn't get any worse, I figure I'm good for the time being.

Anyway this is the perfect time to do an initial review of my new Marcus Dominelli double top 630/50mm guitar.  Spruce and cedar top (with the Spruce uppermost) and Indian rosewood back and sides.

Really really nice workmanship - very precise understated elegance.  And the main goal - easy for me to play - is more than accomplished.   Marcus carved the neck to a profile I sent him from my other guitar and it feels just the same, only everything is a bit closer and easier to reach.

To the main question - how does it sound?  What attracted me to these guitars was the very sweet, penetrating yet full trebles - and this guitar lives up to that expectation.  An absolute pleasure to play the higher notes and just listen to that bell-like sound.  And it's loud.  And resonant - very resonant. That's before taking off the soundport cover (yes it comes with a little magnetic piece of curved rosewood to cover the soundport in case it's too loud).

A couple of things I'm still fine-tuning - on arrival the 3rd string sounded a bit dull compared to that gorgeous crystalline sound on the top 2.  Replacing the d'Addario nylon with a denser Savarez carbon string seems to have sorted that out.  UPDATE Aug 8: best yet - Hannabach Goldin HT super high carbon on the third string.  I experimented with some La Bella medium tension strings (thinking of my arm) and they work fine on the bass but the trebles lost a lot of punch, so back to HT's on the trebles - currently nylon Hannabachs. UPDATE Aug 8: back to the D'Addario HT except for the 3rd string.  I'm now pretty happy with the trebles, but may be experimenting more with the basses.  How do the basses sound?  I definitely think the spruce comes out in this guitar - I think of cedar as offering a mellower softer sound: this guitar is darker and more focused, and certainly not lacking in the loudness department.   It will be interesting to see if the cedar comes out more as it gets played in, Overall I am more than happy with it. My (admittedly non-scientific) test of a guitar is simply whether I want to go on playing it once I start and this one passes - I don't want to put it down!  I suspect it will be quite a while before my other guitar gets an outing...

Oh the exquisite pain! It's here but I can't play it!

Well maybe the title is overkill, but it certainly is frustrating.   I finally got the message that someone of my advanced age has to be sensible about practicing to avoid injury. Hence,  I decided to reevaluate how I'm going to fix the tennis elbow problem : especially since the first approach, physical therapy and toning down the practice hadn't worked.  So next step - attack the problem from several directions.

First there was rest. I'm now on week 4 of guitar (and everything else) rest for the left arm.  With the addition of heat, ultrasound and massage I can finally open a jar with my left hand again.  Yeah! Can still feel it though, so I'm not there yet.

Second - I got really familiar with the use of a timer. Rest with the LH means I can still practice with my right hand, but I've learned my lesson.   The timer is set to 15 mins.  It's a signal - every 15 mins, check for tiredness or stiffness, take a short break, switch to something else for 15 minutes or stop!  Of course I'm not spending that much time with the guitar, (there's only so much time I can keep enthused about Tarrega RH exercises as found in Scott Tennant's Pumping Nylon or the devilish exercises in Ricardo Iznaola's  Kitharalagous), so it's not hard.

Third I reevaluated my guitars.  I am really fortunate to own 2 great guitars.  And I need another guitar like I need a hole in the head, but... ever heard of GAS (guitar acquisition syndrome)?   Anyway, justification came in the form of minimizing the chance of future injury.  Why? the short scale guitar fits me size-wise but has a thicker neck than I would like and is not enormously loud (can be a problem when trying to meet our orchestra conductor's outsize volume requests).  To remedy that problem I have a full size double top that makes a truly awesome sound and has the perfect neck shape.  It's the one I play most, but is a bit of a stretch, being longer in scale and wider in neck width and string spacing.  The solution?   Obviously get a guitar that is a combination of both!   Easier said than done, but then I heard a demo of a short scale double top guitar on this is classical guitar  by luthier Marcus Dominelli in Canada.  The exchange rate is currently very favorable to the US, so to cut a long story short he built me a double top guitar the same size and spacing as my 630 but with a neck shape carved from the template of the bigger guitar.  On time and on budget, (is this the only time I wish it could have taken longer?) and despite being delayed 2 weeks by customs, due no doubt to rosewood of all types being added to CITES appendix II in January 2017,  it arrived this week.

Hence the title.  I've noodled on it, it is definitely loud! but can't actually ♫♫♫ it.  If my guitar teacher wasn't on tour I'd take it for him to play, but in the meantime, here it sits........

First seven days 😟😞😔😑 😟😞😔 of "complete guitar rest" in pictures

Day one:    Felt tempted to play "just a little bit"   Arm not happy.

from meme.com

Day two: Have the guitar on my lap?  Nope. Arm doesn't like that either.

man playing dobro

Day three:  Too much time on my hands. Check out my photo library - this one was pretty cool...

At the Borghese

Day four:   Get working on theory book again.  Eke out a couple of pages.

Day five:   Guitar lesson. Who'd have thought there was so much to do without actually playing?

Right hand position from thisisclassicalguitar.com

Day five:   Could spend the rest of my life messing with nails (but I probably won't).

image from guitars from spain blog

Day six:    Back to theory.  Tell me this is not impossible!

Time to start over

Went to the final concert of the season of my erstwhile orchestra playing with mandolins.  Look at the setting in Charlestown senior living chapel. Cool!

Baltimore classical guitar orchestra with members of mandolin orchestra

Day seven: Give up on suspensions. Spend evening at a house concert instead.  Fantastic music from the Kithara Project (Scott Borg, Adam Levin, Matthew Rohde) at the house of Yevgeny and Svetlana Kalinsky. Here's a link to them playing from the tube

On to week 2...

Are you goal- or process- oriented and how is this relevant to learning guitar?

I know.  This is a classic Myers-Briggs type question: are you focused on reaching your goals or the actual process of getting there?  And what does it have to do with learning classical guitar anyway?
I guess the short answer is that most of us who learn as a hobby are never going to be "finished" learning guitar, so striving towards lofty goals is destined for failure.  But what about more modest goals?  Surely they are appropriate ...

I've always had a love of learning and been a very goal-driven person.  Everything I do, I try to do 110%.  Since I started learning guitar (4 years ago now, somewhat less for classical guitar) I've been fueled by a need to improve.  I love playing; I love practicing; the process is enjoyable; but most especially so when I'm making progress!  In fact when things aren't progressing (or heavens! going backwards) I get really frustrated.  So I'm not sure if I'm really enjoying the process so much as enjoying the "doing" because I relish the results. I didn't see this as a problem, but it turns out being too goal-oriented definitely has its downsides.  I push myself quite hard, and recently this resulted in injury, rehab, and now more injury when I pushed my arm past its limits.  After the first injury I scaled things back, went to physical therapy, followed directions - and then when it was nearly better, threw everything out the window and went back to marathon  practice sessions.  I mean, I had all that downtime to make up for, right? - those goals were getting further away by the minute and I only have the one life to get there...  

Big mistake.

So, reluctantly, half heartedly, I've drastically cut back on how long and what I play.  No more than 15 minutes. Nothing that stresses the arm out, including the piece I'm currently working on (and I so wanted to get it finished so I could work on something new!) Nevertheless until just a few days ago, the thought of stopping playing to give the arm a rest was unthinkable even though my arm didn't seem to be getting much better.  There was my goal-driven self refusing to consider the most sensible course of action again.

But then something unexpected happened.  Because I had all this time to kill between those short sessions of actual playing, I started to do those 'other' music tasks I never had time for because I was too busy practicing.  I just set the timer to do something else for a while.  At first it was taking a stab at that

music theory workbook that got abandoned a year or so ago.  It had mostly fallen by the wayside because (a) it's difficult and (b) the goal (finishing the book and actually understanding it) seemed like a insurmountable task - it required so much work it was taking away from my practice time. However now I was assigning 'time' to the task instead of hurrying to finish, I found I was quite enjoying it.  No pressure: time to figure out how to play the examples on the keyboard and ponder the puzzling bits.  I found myself enjoying working on it, and going way over allotted time.

I found time for other things too...

• viewing music videos and podcasts 
• reviewing my "library" for  music-related books that I had never got around to reading ( I found a book with a cd with guitar ear training exercises on it - didn't even know I had it), so next is... 
• Ear-training 
• Sight reading (I'm forever setting out to do this every day then "forgetting") 

And there are still those tasks I haven't tackled yet, like making the microphone work again, visualizing music without the guitar... the list goes on.

Somewhere in all of this I found myself just enjoying the process. Really enjoying the process of just doing with no obvious goals in mind.  I think assigning "time" to them was the secret. And letting go of the need to reach a certain level of improvement in a particular session/week/month (after all, it was unrealistic at the moment).   In the process I might have discovered what drives those who are generally more process-oriented. As I explore this more in the coming weeks, I'm hoping it will redefine how I approach learning to play the guitar so that I can let go of the need to make progress in favor of appreciating the process and (hopefully) any improvements that result.

How easy it is to forget...

Burning the Brandy...

I've discovered I can forget pieces really fast if I don't play them every week or so.  When I was playing weekly at the Alzheimer's unit this wasn't a problem, but now I'm eking out my playing in little bits so as not to aggravate my arm, that isn't happening.    Yesterday as a break from working on the same piece I've had for several weeks, I thought I'd just run through some of the pieces I can more-or-less play.   Oh dear, not so fast...seems like only parts of them, those parts not necessarily joined together, are still there.  How my brain decides which bits to keep and which bits to forget I will never know, but it can be guaranteed the mistakes never disappear ...

https://soundcloud.com/creamburmese/plum-pudding

Anyway, instead of practicing yesterday I spent a couple of my 15 minute increments "relearning" Andrew York's Royal Plum Pudding.  I have to admit at least half the attraction with this piece is it's name (the other half is it's short so easy to relearn!).   It could still use some interesting dynamics, but at least I got the notes back, and to celebrate I did an Iphone recording. I will say at one time recording myself was an exercise in frustration - it would take 20 minutes or so before I could calm down because of the "red button"syndrome, and then maybe 10 or 12 attempts to get a recording without too many errors.  I've used the phone so much now to hear what I actually sound like that it's become routine - this took only a couple of tries.  Admittedly the tempo needs work and it's not the height of technical sophistication but given I only have short periods of playing...  With a name like "Royal Plum Pudding" the tune would really be more appropriate for Christmas, but I would probably have forgotten it again by then, so I'll post it now.

(BTW - it's traditional to pour brandy over the plum pudding and light it before  cutting into it.  Spectactular (and I've never yet managed to burn even so much as a tablecloth!)

"If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today" -E Joseph Cossman

Hidden Silver Lining?

Image from sciencealert.com

I stupidly overdid it again.  my arm was nearly better,  so in a fit of enthusiasm/stupidity I spent an entire Saturday morning practicing one piece. This was not wise (note the understatement)  because it caused my tennis elbow to flare up again.  Why didn't I follow my physical therapists advice to warm up first, not play for more than 45 minutes, have breaks and stretch, ice etc?    Wish I knew.

As a result I'm reduced to 15 minutes playing before I get to take a break, check the arm, add some ice and do something else.  The good news?  there are actually advantages to being limited to such a short period of time.

• I'm more inclined to think of a small goal for that time than when I have "as long as I feel like playing"
• breaking things down into  small chunks to do in 15 mins is an excellent way to learn something new or tackle a problem.  The time limit prevents frustration setting in.
• Those exercises  I normally can't be bothered with fit nicely into 15 mins.
• I've been learning scales by doing them as a very light staccato (as recommended by my guitar teacher, who is, annoyingly, always right) to prevent stress on the left arm. Turns out that once you've got the movements mastered,  it's not that hard to switch to playing them legato.
• Right hand exercises by themselves actually allow you to focus on what is going wrong with the right hand...
• In the breaks between playing, I've picked up my music theory book again.  I'd stopped working through it because I was at a point where I was truly frustrated. (I think voice leading must be the most arcane subject on the planet!) Now I just do one problem or 10 mins then I can go back to playing again.😊😊 

This time I'm going to follow my physical therapist's advice.   Really.

Quote of the day:  "Sometimes we must do exactly the thing that terrifies us most in order that we may live the life we were meant to have.”  - not attributed.

Counting out loud... now I get it!

I have to admit it.  I've never been a big fan of counting out loud.  Probably because my brain goes into a tailspin if I have to think of more than one thing at once.  In any case, I don't usually have much of a problem figuring out rhythms - I can work out the distances between notes without engaging my language centers and that works for my recalcitrant brain.

However recently I hit a road block.  In a renaissance piece I was learning, whatever I did, I could not keep the tempo even.  Inevitably I'd get to one or 2 phrases where I'd speed up. (I'm not the only one - seems to be a common problem with people posting this piece on youtube.)  Even if I was concentrating solely on the tempo, my fingers would run away with me.  The only way I could keep it in check was to have the metronome running, but obviously that wasn't a long term solution.  So my guitar teacher suggested I try counting the tempo out loud...  I'm pretty sure he didn't know I had been avoiding this and therefore suggested it for just that reason, but I have my suspicions...

Anyway, before I concentrated on the tempo problem, the first task was just to keep playing while counting.  As I mentioned before, my brain doesn't like doing 2 things at once and while I'm trying to remember to count to 4 (with 'ands' thrown in for good measure) I'm forgetting to play the notes.  Or counting up to 6.  Or forgetting the 'ands'.    However I persevered and it actually didn't take that long (though I do still sometimes end up with interestingly long measures).   So next to apply it to the problem areas.  There were actually 2 areas where the tempo was running amok- the first was just a run of fast notes. This responded gratifyingly quickly to counting the notes out loud (even if I did end up counting it as 1and2and3and4and5and6 in a 4/4 piece) - I even confirmed success by checking a recording with the metronome and followed it up with just counting in my head to be sure it still worked.   The second problem section had 2 voices where the emphasis wasn't on the 1st and 3rd beats of the measure.   That one was a much tougher nut to crack.  I ended up playing one note at a time and learning which number went with which voice even to count correctly while playing.   Tedious.   But when I got the count right the tempo was spot on.  At this point it's still a challenge for me to count that part and I have to practice the count before running the piece.  Hopefully the correct tempo will eventually get fixed in my brain without me having to count though ...  

So although I still won't be counting out loud to get rhythms unless they are particularly tricky,  I can see this will be an interesting tool to control tempo - yet another weird trick I would never have thought of on my own.